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How We’re Made

Wed 1 Sep 2021 - 02:26

by Christopher Zerby

“I stood above him, wings unfurled, but what I saw in his face made me lower them. He was terrified.”

We had a fire going on the roof of the Museum, same as most nights, and I noticed him sitting on the edge of it, across from me. I’d never seen him before. He hunkered down in a big, black coat, holding out his pale, skeletal hands to grab a bit of warmth, laughing a little behind the rest, like he didn’t quite get the jokes. I figured someone must have brought him, but no one was talking with him.

Bang was there of course. So was Chittle, and Peapod, and maybe a dozen others, the usual crew. We had some juice someone snatched, and I felt drunk, maybe straddling the edge of wild. He was the skinniest thing. I mean, we were all skinny. We were made that way to begin with, and we were starving most of the time, subsisting on whatever could be snatched from the Apes or picked out of the garbage. You can’t be too proud. Besides, you can’t fly with too much meat on your bones.

I prodded Bang. “Who’s that? I didn’t see him fly in.”

She shrugged. “Don’t know. But I could eat him up.”

I thought I could too. He had massive brown eyes peeking out under long, dark bangs, and in the firelight his pale skin looked almost translucent. Gorgeous. The more I stared at him the more violent my desire grew. I felt a tickle in my gut, and the warm flush that always started down there.

I picked up my can of juice and got to my feet. I wanted to get over to him before Bang or one of the others made a move. I stretched as tall as I could get, jutting out my bare chest and spreading my wings wide. They all stared. Of course they did. My wings are beautiful, blue-black and huge, the biggest on the rooftop, maybe, except for Bang’s. Peapod gave an audible gasp. I’d been with him before, but I could have him anytime. The show wasn’t for him.

I pumped my wings sending trash and debris clattering across the rooftop, suffusing the air with my scent.

“Knock it off, Senna.” Bang shielded her eyes and shook her wings, a few feathers dancing free in the air, letting me know I was pissing her off. But it was a warning, not a challenge. Everyone else was entranced.

Except the new guy.

Oh, he was staring at me, alright, but he cowered beneath his coat. I tipped back my can and drank, felt the bitter juice burn my throat as a bit of excess ran down my chin, and strutted around the fire to where he sat.

I stood above him, wings unfurled, but what I saw in his face made me lower them. He was terrified. Not my intention at all. Maybe a little awe, a bit of lust would have been appropriate. He was tensed and ready to bolt. Although I didn’t see how he was going anywhere with his wings crammed under his coat.

I wanted him to stay. I held out my can.

“Juice?”

He didn’t move. The others had gone back to laughing and teasing each other when I dropped my wings, but it wouldn’t do to be rejected in front of a crowd. The moment seemed to stretch on way too long. Right before my annoyance tipped over into anger he took the can and drank. His bony hand trembled, from fear, cold, maybe both. It’s ok, I thought. The juice will warm you up and make you brave.

I pushed in next to him. I caught a nice whiff of his scent, felt the desire in my gut and wondered if he saw the flush spreading across my chest, but I stayed composed. I didn’t want to scare him off.

“I’m Senna.” I smiled. Not my best expression, but it worked. He smiled back.

“I’m Eamon.”

He wasn’t as small as he’d seemed hunched down across the fire, but he was emaciated. I could see the sinews in his neck, and his skin stretched taut across his face. I had the urge to fold my wings around him and hold him close in the dark and warmth. If I’d had anything to eat I would have offered it.

We passed the juice back and forth and gradually he relaxed.

“I haven’t seen you before.” I kept one eye on him and one eye on Peapod who was grappling now with another youngling I recognized but couldn’t name. They were playing. For now.

“It’s my first time. On the roof, anyway. I’ve snuck into the Museum before. At night.”

“The Museum? Why?” I didn’t even know what was inside the building. Once, somebody had vandalized the big sign hanging in front, scrawling an “UN” in red paint above the “Natural History.”

Eamon shrugged. I thought he might be pretty drunk already, a skinny thing like him.

“Where do you usually stay?”

He bit his lip, staring into the fire. “In Old City. I had to get out of there.”

I squirmed a little, forcing myself to relax, still trying not to be too aggressive. I sensed it would turn bad if I did, but I could smell him. Sweet and grassy. Fresh and new.

“Old City. Huh.” Old City was full of low buildings and Apes. Not a lot of safe spots. Nobody I knew stayed over there. “Why’d you have to leave?”

He took a long swallow of juice, not meeting my eye.

Peapod screeched and took off running, his bare feet slapping against the cold rooftop. Wings spread wide, he leapt into the air, gathering height with a couple of pumps, circling above the fire. Several other younglings launched themselves into the air, following him.

“Don’t come back without food!” Bang shook her wings and sat back, stretching her legs out so her feet were practically in the fire. Her predatory eyes glinted in my direction, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at Eamon.

He noticed too and I felt him shiver despite the fire and the juice. His big brown eyes glistened as they met mine. He seemed so helpless. He raised his head, pushing against me, finding my lips with his. He trembled as I wrapped my arms around him.

Mine, Bang, mine.

* * *

No way Eamon would have followed me to the spot at the back of the roof behind the big steel vents if he was sober, but we finished the can of juice, I grabbed another off a youngling, and we drank that too. We didn’t talk much. I’m better with actions than words, so I kept sticking my tongue down his throat, and when I pulled him away from the fire, he didn’t fight.

There was a tangle of blankets and old clothes to climb into and the vents blocked some of the wind, so it wasn’t too cold. I was burning up anyway. He stood with his back to the lights of the city as I kissed him and slid my hand along his chest, my fingers tracing his jutting bones, and though he parried my every move, I knew he was warming by the telltale flush on his chest. The air was dense with our mingled scents.

He keened as I worked my way down his neck. It sounded more like pain than pleasure, but when he pushed against me I felt how much he wanted me. I nipped at his ear and he shuddered.

“Take off your jacket,” I whispered. “Let me see them.”

He broke away, taking a step back. Caught up in my own desire I lunged for him.

“No!”

He fought me off and stumbled in the pile of blankets, falling to his knees. He crouched, protecting his face with his bony arms and I stopped, suddenly aware of how I loomed over him, wings wide like I was ready to strike. I folded them back.

“Okay, Eamon. Okay.” I knelt, but didn’t touch him though my body screamed for it. It’s so hard to control. He panted, soft and desperate.

We stayed there for a long time until I grew cold. I settled into the pile, tucked in my wings and draped a blanket over them. After a time, Eamon moved closer and we nestled together. I still wanted him, still felt a little loopy from his scent, but it receded to a dull, lingering ache. There were occasional bursts of laughter from the other side of the roof, and once or twice in the distance I saw the dark silhouettes of flyers riding the air currents above the city as they searched for opportunity, perhaps an Ape out alone on a dark street.

Eamon saw them too. I kissed his neck, just below his ear. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “We could hunt.” I could tell something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t stop myself from touching him.

His huge brown eyes, so close, got hard all of a sudden, distant. He looked at me from a million miles away.

He stood and unzipped his coat. My pulse quickened. He dropped it to the rooftop and opened his wings. I cocked my head, trying to understand what I saw.

They were skeletal things. A few feathers clung here and there like the last few leaves on a dying tree. I stood and moved close. Ropes of lumpy scars crisscrossed the leathery skin, which was puckered and red. There were sores, gently weeping, and although he could move them a little, it was obvious he would never fly.

“What happened?” I felt a little sick, all the juice I’d drank roiling in my stomach. “How did you get up here?”

“I climbed.” His voice was raw and I caught the sour smell of fear and desperation. “I couldn’t stand to be down there any longer.”

I pictured him pulling himself up the side of the building, clinging to the bricks like an insect in the dark. Sneaking over the edge onto the rooftop hoping none of us would notice as he took his place at the fire. He looked so frail standing there with his ruined wings, so insubstantial, like he might blow away in the wind, but his eyes stayed hard, and he thrust out his bony chest in challenge.

“I’ll go,” he said.

Wings beat overhead in the darkness, maybe Peapod and his playmates returning. I hoped they didn’t see Eamon, his wings, his deformity. It would make them aggressive, agitated, that weakness.

I felt a little of it myself, but I shook it off and pulled him to the blankets. I started at his mouth and kissed my way down his body, taking my time, the sharp edge of my desire softened now with something new. I wanted to protect him. Now he was kissing me, hungrily. He lay back and I straddled him, wings spread, slipping him inside me as he began to keen once more.

* * *

I woke, still tangled in the pile, to Eamon pulling on his coat. I reached for him, sleepy, eager for him again, but he pulled away, his long bangs hiding his eyes.

“I have to go,” he said. “Before the others wake.”

I struggled to sit up, my head still muddled, half in dreams. “You can’t go now. It’s practically light out. It’s not safe.” Apes would be all over the city soon, going about their business. They weren’t always hostile to us, but we certainly weren’t loved, and they were strong. A full-grown Ape could shred wings, could shatter our hollow bones.

I’d seen it. A few weeks earlier, a youngling, Crescent or Crystal, something like that, got caught snatching a purse. The Ape grabbed her in midair by the wrist, squeezed and crushed it to powder. She got away, but I saw her that night curled up on the Museum roof, hand dangling useless as she clutched it to her chest. I don’t know if she survived. She stopped showing up.

“I can manage.” Eamon had the hard look in his eyes. “I manage every day.”

“But you can’t…” Fly. I stopped myself as he glared. “Don’t leave. I’ll go out in a while and steal us food. We can stay here.” I gestured at the blankets and gave what I hoped was an alluring smile. “Until dark. Then I’ll see you home.”

Eamon shook his head. “If I stay, you’ll have to fight her.” His voice was low and tremulous.

He was right. I’d seen how Bang looked at him. Things between me and her were coming to a head in any case. She was in charge, but I was on my way up and she knew it. I’d seen her fight a dozen times; she was fast, vicious. I wasn’t sure if I could beat her.

“I’ll beat her.”

He stood, hunched under his coat. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t want to be the cause, either way.”

I followed him over to the edge of the roof, fighting the urge to grab him and pull him back. I couldn’t help some of it. We’re made that way. But I also wanted him to want to stay with me, and I’d never felt that before.

“I’ll come back another night,” he said, slipping over the side. “I promise.”

I leaned over the edge, watching him painstakingly crawl down the side of the building. I was worried at first, but he never faltered, never seemed like he might slip. Despite his disfigurement there was something so strong underneath. When he made it to the street and strode off, coat wrapped around him, I knew I wouldn’t risk never seeing him again. I would follow him.

* * *

I soared high above the city, drafting on the currents, feeling the wind’s icy tongue lick my bare chest, my gut roiling with excitement the way it always did. Flying. It was everything.

I kept an eye on Eamon as he wound his way toward the Old City and even though I stayed distant so there’d be no chance he’d notice me, I never feared losing him. His scent filled my nose still, clung to me, mingled with my own. The flying and the thought of the way he moved inside of me during the night had me inflamed, and I darted and rolled, diving toward the rooftops and spinning away again. I saw others in the sky but they avoided me. They could tell I was aroused and might knock them to the earth in that state, and my wings were spread wide, wider than any of them. They were right to be afraid of me.

It took Eamon an hour to get to Old City, and there I had to be more careful. The buildings were low, Apes were everywhere, and none of our kind were nearby. Eamon seemed confident, however, moving with purpose. He hung to the edges of the street, avoiding the slow gridlocked cars and throngs of pedestrians, and no one bothered him. He was at home, part of the environment.

He turned on to a shabby side street and slowed his pace as I drafted above him. On one side a row of brown tenements squatted close together, separated by narrow alleys. On the other there were tiny houses, shacks really, dilapidated and ugly. Eamon stopped in front of one for a second as if catching his breath, and went inside.

I settled onto the roof of the tenement opposite and tried to get a look inside the squalid little structure that must have been his home, but the curtains were drawn. It didn’t matter. I knew where he lived and I’d approach him when it got dark and convince him to return to the Museum. Meanwhile, I would hunt and sleep.

Hunting was poor in Old City. There were no wealthy Apes with fat purses strolling about, and no tall buildings hugging the streets to be used as cover for a quick snatch and grab. I had to settle for a meal scavenged from the trash, but I didn’t care. I’d eaten worse lots of times, or gone without eating altogether. I made it back to my stakeout spot in the early afternoon, found a tarp on the tenement roof to hide from the bright sun, and curled up to sleep.

* * *

I woke as the sun was disappearing below the tall buildings in the distance. I shrugged off the tarp and sat on the edge of the roof, peering at the little house. A pale light glowed behind the thin, tattered curtains. I relaxed and waited.

At full dark I hopped into the air and landed on the sidewalk in front of Eamon’s house. The street was quiet, no Apes around. It was a moonless night and I felt comfortable I wouldn’t be spotted as I crept to the window. I peered inside through a hole in one of the curtains.

Eamon sat on a low bench, coatless, his back to me. His decrepit wings were open, but hung listlessly, and I felt a warm blush of shame to be spying on him. With his guard down he had none of the defiant hardness he’d shown in flashes on the Museum roof, nor the confidence with which he navigated the Ape filled streets. The sag of his shoulders reminded me instead of the way he’d huddled by the fire and cringed when I’d tried to force myself on him. My shame deepened. I would leave him alone, I decided, and come find him another night. As I turned, I caught a flicker of movement at the far end of the room. Eamon wasn’t alone.

A small, hunched, old man appeared. His smiling face was wrinkled and saggy, and a slack belly hung over the belt holding up his drab grey pants. What was Eamon doing with this tiny Ape?

When he passed from the dim shadows deeper in the room, I gasped. He was one of us. An elder. I thought I might be sick.

He had no wings, just two shriveled, black stumps and his back was covered with the same ropy scars Eamon had, the same puckered red skin. But no sores. His disfigurement had happened long ago.

A disease. The elder disappeared from sight again. Was this Eamon’s sire? Did it pass from generation to generation? Was that why they lived apart from the rest of us in this little hovel among the Apes, hidden away in Old City?

Cold terror gripped me. Was it contagious? I strained to touch my wings, to feel for sores. Was I infected?

The elder returned and set a tray on a small table. Eamon’s shoulders and wings shook, and through the thin glass I heard his muffled sobs. He shook harder as the elder gently rubbed his arm and whispered in his ear. When Eamon finally calmed the elder turned to the tray. He put on gloves, the brown leather stained and rotting, and busied himself mixing a paste in a bowl. He muttered as he worked, adding a few drops of liquid from a glass decanter. He mixed some more and approached Eamon with the bowl and a tiny brush. Medicine.

Eamon began crying again. I watched the elder’s profile as he bent to examine the tattered wings. Help him. Please help him. Despite the fear for myself, I wanted that, more than anything.

The elder squinted with concentration, mouth slightly open. He brought the glistening brush up, flicking his pink tongue to lick his lips. He smiled.

Eamon keened as the elder delicately brushed the base of his wing. The keening grew shrill. The elder’s look made me go cold. I knew it well, a mix of predatory zeal and consuming pleasure. The glistening patch on Eamon’s wing he’d painted blackened and puckered, and the elder’s chest and neck flushed an obscene pink.

My heart pounded as I rushed the door, yanking it open, wings spread wide, forcing my way through the narrow space with a shower of feathers. The elder dropped his bowl and it shattered, splattering his concoction as I leapt on him.

I pinned him to the floor, wrapping my hands around his flabby neck and squeezed until his pink tongue lolled from his mouth as he wheezed and struggled. He reeked of greasy, sour fear, and something else, something rotten below the surface, making me gag as I choked him. He turned purple.

“Stop! Stop it!”

Eamon flailed at my arms and my head but I hardly felt the blows. I tightened my grip. In my rage I beat my wings, knocking Eamon backwards into the table, upending the tray and tools, and he tumbled to the floor, despoiled wings in the air, tattered and vulnerable.

I released the elder who sagged, unconscious, and crawled toward Eamon, ignoring the debris crunching beneath my hands and knees. I pulled his thin body to me and wrapped my arms around him, rocking him back and forth, whispering apologies. He let me for a moment, but pushed me away.

“You shouldn’t have followed me.” He turned his back. “I don’t want you here.”

My body screamed to hold him, protect him, but I forced myself not to touch him. “I don’t understand, Eamon. Why was he doing that? Why would you let him hurt you?”

Outside, somewhere far down the street, I heard an Ape’s cackling laughter. I felt sick to my stomach.

Eamon stared at the floor. “He lets me live here. He looked after me when I was young. Now, I look after him.”

“No. Let him rot. He’s a monster. You don’t owe him anything.”

“It’s none of your business. I can’t just fly up to the rooftops where it’s safe, like you.” He bared his teeth and spread his poor, tattered wings as if he’d strike out, but he dropped them. “I look after him. He looked after me. I look after him.”

The words were mechanical, like he’d repeated them to himself night after night.

“I’ll look after you,” I whispered.

He shivered, his wings quivering. The elder groaned.

Eamon rushed to him and cradled his head. He turned to me: “Help me.”

We carried the limp elder to a dirty pallet in a gloomy corner, and laid him down with a pillow to pad the blackened stumps where his wings had been. He groaned some more. Eamon sat with him, whispering until he sunk into a deep, rasping sleep, then fetched a glass of water and set it beside the pallet. He sat beside me on the bench.

“You shouldn’t have followed me.” This time when he said it his voice cracked, his long bangs hiding his eyes.

“Come with me. Leave this.” I gestured around the small room, cluttered with dusty things, and the broken debris from the brief struggle. “I’ll protect you. I’ll feed you. Come with me.”

“I can’t,” he whispered.

“You can.” A fierce desire rose inside me at his vulnerability, even as it shamed me. I couldn’t help it. I was made that way. “I won’t leave you here with that thing.”

The close air was rich with my scent. It suffused us as we sat on the bench, legs almost touching. He cringed, nostrils flaring. I fought to keep my wings down, to not grab him.

“They won’t accept me.”

“I’ll make them.”

He didn’t meet my eye. “She’ll challenge you. For me.”

Bang. He was still right. She would. “Let her. I’m not afraid.”

Eamon crossed to the elder and stood over him, jaw clenched, the sinews of his neck taut and visible as he stared. Through the haze of my own aggressive desire I caught a whiff of a strange scent, complex, confusing. It held floral notes, a sad longing, even love, but something darker underneath made me scowl. A pungent loathing. The reek of death.

“I’ll go with you,” he said, and there was a terrible grimace on his face, the look I’d seen on so many younglings as they launched forward into a fight.

When he reached out I thought he might wrap his hands around the old man’s scrawny neck and finish the job I’d started, but he just pulled the blankets up a little higher. Now his face was unreadable, a placid mask. One perfected over time.

* * *

We had to trek through Old City because as slight as Eamon was, I didn’t think I could fly him. The Apes let us be; Eamon moved through the city almost as if he was invisible. It seemed to rub off on me as well.

We arrived at the Museum close to midnight. I knew the others were on the rooftop, and Bang would be there. I felt a twinge of fear even as a part of me embraced the thought of her challenge and my wings flexed in anticipation. But when I looked at Eamon, head craning on his thin neck at the building towering before us, I softened. He was exhausted, cowering under his coat, his eyes framed by dark circles. And he had to climb.

“I’ll climb with you.”

He shook his head. “You don’t have to. I’ll see you up there.”

I took him in my arms. “I want to.”

We climbed. It was hard, much harder than I’d imagined. Eamon was agile and practiced, clinging to the porous bricks like a lizard, pulling himself over the jutting ledges. I sweated and grunted, struggling to keep pace. Eamon noticed and slowed. We settled into a rhythm, side by side, and the rooftop grew closer.

We were almost at the top when Eamon paused on a ledge to let me rest. I panted and tried to stay calm. I was wearing myself out with the climb. A whoop and some laughter drifted from the darkness. I had to force my wings to stay down. Bang was up there. Soon I’d have to face her.

“You asked me why I sneak into the museum at night,” Eamon said. “When we met.”

I wiped sweat from my eyes. “I did.”

“I look at the exhibits.”

I shook my head. “What’s an exhibit?”

His broken wings shuddered a little, with surprise or laughter I wasn’t sure. “You know. Stuffed animals. They’ve got dogs, foxes, giant cats. One of them has fangs, maybe five, six inches long.” I could smell his excitement. “There are things with hooves, things with horns. There’s an elephant in there, Senna, in the middle of a big room. It has its trunk raised high in the air, and it glares at you. Its eyes follow you everywhere you go.”

I’d heard of elephants somewhere. Big. Massive even. Grey. I nodded.

“But they also have Apes. Stuffed Apes. Some of them are normal.” His voice was disembodied, insubstantial as the wind whistled past. “But some of them, in the back, have tails. Fur. Scales. Long, pointed skulls, giant owl eyes.”

He moved close and I breathed in his wonderful scent. But it was tinged with something sour, something pungent.

“And some have wings,” he whispered.

I felt myself flush and I was glad for the dark so he might not notice. I couldn’t help it, but I was still ashamed. He was trying to tell me something. Something important. My mind was a muddled stew of desire.

“We’re experiments. They made us to be special, to be great, but we’re not. We are grotesques. Mistakes. Fucking mistakes.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“My sire.” He shook his head. “I mean the elder I live with. He told me. He helped me understand.”

I saw the elder, his smile, the flush on his chest. I imagined him plucking Eamon off the street when he was just a youngling, taking him in, making him feel safe, filling his head with these ideas. How could the Apes have “made” us?

“I’m not a mistake.” I spread my beautiful wings, beat them, once, twice, wafting my scent into the air. Let Bang smell it. I wanted to scream. I wanted to fly back to Old City, back to the decrepit little house and rip out the elder’s throat.

Instead, I pulled Eamon to me, wrapping him in my arms. “You’re not a mistake.” I caressed his damaged wings, hidden beneath his coat. “He did this to you. He’s the one who’s grotesque.” It was difficult to push him away, but I did. We had to a little farther still to go.

* * *

I went over the edge of the roof first, a bit clumsy, Eamon slipping over like a whisper to stand beside me. They were all there around the fire, staring.

Bang stood, eyes glittering, and raised her wings. They were large and crimson, a dark, bloody red. The others moved away from her. I took a deep breath and raised my own wings as high and wide as I could. I caught a whiff of her scent, an acrid spice I’d tasted before when she’d attacked others, and fought the urge to cower. I couldn’t show fear.

“You’re back, Senna.” Her eyes flicked to Eamon and she let her gaze linger, showing me disrespect, like I wasn’t a threat. Her chest flushed. “Give him to me.”

I took a step forward, clenching my fists. “No.”

Bang laughed still leering at Eamon. “You want to fight me over him? Why? There’s something wrong with him, isn’t there?” She took a step, pumped her wings. “Why doesn’t he fly?”

I smelled Eamon’s shame like a thick coating of oil in the air. “There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“Liar.” Peapod crouched behind Bang, wings up, eyes glinting. “I saw him last night. I saw it all.”

I wanted to rip his conniving, jealous head off. They all knew.

“Give him to me.” Bang took another step forward shoving a cowering youngling out of her way and kicked at the fire, sending a scatter of sparks into the night. “Or I’m going to take him from you.”

Eamon tried to come forward but I pushed him back. She would rush me, I’d seen her do it so often, and I didn’t want him getting caught between us. My guts roiled. Every cell in my body urged me to attack before she came at me, and I struggled to wait, not to lash out in fear and panic. She was grinning, showing her teeth, like she knew I couldn’t beat her. The others knew it too. I could smell their excitement in a confusing riot of jagged scent.

Bang leapt across the fire, a billow of black smoke rolling with her as she beat her wings and pummeled my face and head. I dropped to one knee as her sharp nails raked across my cheek and a hot wash of blood splattered in my eyes. She was strong. She drove me down onto the other knee but I managed to grab her wrists and we twisted back and forth trying to throw each other over. She spat and cursed. She reeked of musk, which drove my rage into a wild fury. Younglings screeched and danced above us in the air.

She glared, her eyes black and huge, spit flying from her open mouth. I let go of one wrist, and as her nails slashed my face again, I reared back and punched her, hard, in the jaw. Her grip loosened and I threw her down. I grabbed one crimson wing with both hands as I straddled her back and screamed.

“Senna! Don’t.”

I snarled. Eamon crouched before me, huge brown eyes pleading. The air was sickly sweet now, the younglings around us anticipating what was about to happen. Bang groaned. I could feel the delicate bones of her wing.

“Don’t,” Eamon said. “Please.” I stared at him. He was reeling me in, again, asking me to go against my nature. I tightened my grip on the wing, seeing the elder’s face as I’d squeezed his neck. It felt so good.

I slammed Bang’s head onto the rooftop, feeling her go slack beneath me. I ripped some feathers out and threw them into the air with another scream. It was part triumph, part frustration. I wanted to break her, take her place, but Eamon didn’t want me to.

He took my arm, stroking my heaving, blood covered chest.

He led me to the edge of the roof. The younglings followed, gathering around us, wings up and alert. They were confused, not understanding why I hadn’t crippled Bang, ending the fight properly, and they were aroused, dangerous. They wanted resolution.

Eamon ducked past me, unzipping his coat, slipping it off.

“No!” I reached for him but it was too late.

There was silence. I smelled fear. Some of it was Eamon’s, maybe some was mine, but it also drifted across the rooftop from the others. He turned slowly back and forth, spreading his wings, scars visible in the yellow moon light, and a gust of wind ruffled the few feathers he had left, lifting one off into the darkness. I tried to meet his gaze but he looked right through me. He was wearing his mask again. He posed for the younglings, for me too, body rigid and so still, he looked unnatural, unreal.

Peapod stared, lips puckered like he’d swallowed rotten meat, and most of the other younglings looked away, tucking and folding their wings.

I took Eamon’s hand, caressed it, felt his warmth. The mask fell. He looked at me, brown eyes wet, and his shoulders slumped.

I pulled him close, wrapping him in a protective embrace, and pushed off the edge of the roof. For a moment, we dropped. He was so heavy, despite his slight frame. Then I caught an updraft. Pumping my wings, struggling, I gained equilibrium and we rose. Eamon’s lips were against my neck, and his sweet, grassy scent, suffused me. Below us, the city was filled with lights. Somewhere out there, we’d find a place to land.

 

* * *

About the Author

Christopher Zerby is a Los Angeles based speculative fiction writer and a leading expert on imaginary robots. His stories have appeared in The Colored Lens, Five on the Fifth, and Murder Park After Dark. In a previous life he mixed records and drove around the U.S. and Canada in a van playing music. He regrets nothing. You can find him on twitter: @chriszerby or visit his website: https://www.christopherzerby.com/

Categories: Stories

Eye of the Beholder

Wed 1 Sep 2021 - 02:25

by Kara Hartz

“How seriously would her report be taken if one of the first alien creatures she described was a perfect textbook fairy tale unicorn? She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to do it.”

Katelyn’s hands shook, making the image through her scope jump and blur. She gave up trying to look. It couldn’t be what it looked like. Well, maybe it could be. This planet hadn’t had a full astrobiology research team here before. She was the first human to set eyes on these animals. But still… no, it couldn’t be.

She’d been so determined not to harbor any preconceived notions about what alien life should look like. She’s wanted to be open to the most bizarre, the most alien beings possible, so she didn’t miss anything, that she’d been taken completely off guard by the so familiar, yet so impossible sight.

Before her lay a green field with a stream running off to the eastern edge, the alien had been standing with its back to her. It looked an awful lot like the hind end of a horse except for the silvery, sparkly tail that shimmered so brightly it almost hurt to look at. Then the creature had lifted its head, with its matching shiny mane, and… the horn. The single golden horn. How seriously would her report be taken if one of the first alien creatures she described was a perfect textbook fairy tale unicorn? She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to do it.

She laid her scope aside and pulled her camera out of its case. It had a tripod, so she wouldn’t need to worry about her shaking hands. She looked up to make sure the alien was still there. It had its head back down, returned to its grazing, but was still there.

“Report in, Number Four,” her radio buzzed. She snatched it up before Jose could ask again.

“Number Four. Subject under observation. Request minimal radio noise until all clear,” she whispered, and then held a hand over the speaker to muffle Jose’s response when it came.

“Understood.”

The unicorn was still eating peacefully, apparently undisturbed by the noise. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

She snapped photos and made notes, creeping ever closer. The creature began moving away over a gentle hill in the lush pasture, and she followed. On the other side, the alien met up with a half dozen more just like it. The small herd greeted the newcomer, rearing up, and vocalizing with a sound like tinkling bells. They were so beautiful. Despite the cloudless sunny day, a rainbow formed in the sky behind them. This was totally insane. How was she possibly going to explain this to anyone? Katelyn wasn’t sure how long she stood there, tears welling up in her eyes, but she was proud of herself to at last remember to lift her camera and get some pictures before the rainbow faded.

As she took her photos, one of the aliens, she thought it was the original one she’d followed, turned to look at her. She realized then that she was standing out in the open, at the top of a hill no less. She squatted down, but knew it was too little, too late. But the creature didn’t flee. It approached. As it started back up the slope directly toward her, she stood back up. It paused, tilting its head to look at her with one eye, the sun glinting off its radiant horn. What could it be made of to shine like that? It didn’t look like bone, and it was so sharp!

She found herself walking slowly down the hillside until she and the unicorn were face to face. It gave a small tinkling whinny to her. She let out a laugh, her tears now flowing freely. It was like a dream.

“All stations report immediately. Alert! Alert!”

The alien cocked it head at the radio hanging from Katelyn’s belt. The other members of the herd had taken notice of her now, and were coming to join them.

“Number Four report. Something’s happened to Josh and Amy. Report in now.”

Her most ambitions daydreams about what she might discover doing astrobiology fieldwork didn’t involve anything as breathtaking as these unicorns. She was totally consumed with the magnificent creature in front of her. She held out a tentative hand.

“Katelyn, please respond. Please!”

An alien behind her nuzzled at the radio, knocking it from her belt and onto the grass, and silenced it with a hoof as it stepped around her. Katelyn didn’t notice. She thought the unicorn in front of her was going to put its nose against her hand, but instead, as its head neared, it gave her a gentle lick with its warm pink tongue. It was the happiest moment of her life.

* * *

“We found their equipment,” Jose said to the stern faced, grey haired woman on the small monitor in front of him.

“And…?” She shared his red eyes and tired voice. The whole project team was in mourning.

“All the same story. What they recorded in their notes and what they recorded on film are completely different. They all seem to have been attacked by the same type of small, pack hunting aliens. Really vulgar, vicious things. But their logs all describe other things: mermaids, unicorns, hobbits, and one – a miniature giraffe.”

“Hallucinations.”

“That’s what we think. We aren’t yet sure what caused it though. We scavenged a few… remains.” He looked involuntarily toward the ship’s deep freeze where biological specimens were stored. “Hopefully they’ll give you more information when they can be examined.”

“That doesn’t sound too hopeful. What sorts of remains?”

“Bones mostly. Some bits we aren’t too sure about. But Katelyn’s –” his voice faded, and he had to clear his throat to continue, “skull was found intact.”

“Oh. Umm, good, then.” The woman looked away. “Well, after you set the warning beacons and get on your way, I’ll look forward to seeing you home again. Be safe.”

 

* * *

Originally published in Cover of Darkness

About the Author

Kara has worked with animals all her adult life, from wild animal training at a theme park to volunteering with wildlife rehabs, farm animal sanctuaries, and the local SPCA. She currently works as a Registered Veterinary Technician in Northern California.

Like many writers, it was her love of reading that gave her the impulse to start to write. Science-fiction and fantasy were always the most fun for both.

During the pandemic, she is attempting to grow a garden and learning to play D&D with her family. Both are coming along with mixed results.

She blogs on many subjects at https://karahartz.com/ and can be found on Twitter @karabu74.

Categories: Stories

Moonbow

Wed 1 Sep 2021 - 02:25

by Jason Kocemba

“She was lit not by moon or sun but by light from another world.”

It was late in the afternoon when I stepped out of the loamy dimness beneath the trees and into the brightness of the low afternoon sun. It would soon be hidden behind the cliffs of the valley, creating a premature twilight.

A large animal called out from the trees. I looked back into the gloom but could see nothing. What kind of wildlife lived in this valley, anyway?

I considered going back to Carrie and Billy at the campsite, but it didn’t really matter if I went back now or later: it would still be dark when I got there. Perhaps if I returned later the noisy animal would be gone.

That decided it.

I continued on, hearing the falls as a distant hissing rumble. And then I rounded an outcrop of bare stone and there they were, the Magus Falls: a five-meter-wide sheet of water that fell sixty meters down the cliff. There was the roar as thousands of tonnes of water fell to smash apart into a boiling torrent at the bottom. Tiny droplets of water billowed out as a thick mist, blown away by the water displaced air. A small loch had formed beneath the cliffs which emptied into a river that flowed away to my left. The rocks that were hammered by the deluge were bare, wet and dark. The farther from the water the greener the rocks became: carpets of lichens and mosses covered the tops of boulders and the face of the cliff, thriving in the constant misty damp.

I stood on the path by the shore of the loch and watched the water fall.

On the right, the path curved behind the curtain of water. It was dark under there. Was that a cave behind the falls? If so, I wanted to explore it, but: one, I had no waterproofs; two, no change of clothes; and three, it was already late. Maybe I could convince Carrie and Billy to come back tomorrow with swimsuits and towels?

The mist coated everything with tiny droplets of water, including me. My jacket, jeans and hair were spotted with thousands of them. I licked my lips and they tasted salty and tangy with dissolved minerals.

Then the whole world began to sparkle with golden light.

I looked behind me and saw the sun had lowered enough to touch the rim of the valley, and the last rays of the day shone on the millions of water droplets.

It was like magic.

As the sun sank behind the cliffs, the golden sparkles winked out as the shadow crept across the valley floor and soon the light was gone and I was left in shadow.

I looked up, and there, rising above the undulating surface of the river at the top of Magus Falls was the full moon. It was the largest moon I’d ever seen, it almost seemed too big for the sky. It rose higher and grew brighter as the sun set. The roar of the falls and the misty droplets covered me like a blanket.

I blinked. Long and slow.

My hands felt numb with cold when I wiped moisture from my face. I tore my eyes free of the moon.

The sky was dark. How long had I stood there watching the moon rise?

I glanced at Magus falls and the breath caught in my throat. The moonlight shone through the mist and produced an ethereal bow of silvery light. The edges of the bow faded through the colors of the spectrum to darkness. The curve of the bow reached half-way up the falls and then fell down beyond the dark ribbon of the path.

Not a rainbow but a moonbow. Its light there and not there at the same time. I didn’t want to blink in case it went away.

On the path, under the arch of the moonbow, a shadowy shape appeared from beneath the water curtain. It was shaped like a horse as it walked along the path and away from the crashing noise of the waterfall. When it reached the light of the moonbow, it walked in front of the glow. After a few more strides the shadow-horse stopped. It lifted its head and looked behind it, towards the water tumbling off the cliff. It stood motionless for several seconds. But now, with no change that I could see, the shadow-horse looked tense, as if ready to bolt.

<Danger/death/fear,> came a voice in my head. <Flee/away/run.>

The head of the shadow-horse began to glow silver like the moonbow. Between one blink and the next, the shadow shape disappeared, as if it were never there.

My heart pumped hard in my chest, thumping, thumping as I tried to understand what had just happened. What had been that voice in my head? Was I still in a trance under the spell of the moon?

The moonbow darkened. No longer silver, but redder.

My hands curled into fists. I pressed my teeth together. It felt like someone was tickling the back of my neck as the hairs stood up.

Another shadow appeared under the moonbow and flowed along the path. Its shape changed as it moved. Not once did it look like a horse.

The shadow stopped and I saw its eyes glow like the altered moonbow: a dark muddy red.

A deep growl vibrated in my mind. For a moment I didn’t know what to do. And then I remembered that the other voice in my head, the one that spoke, had told me I should run.

So I ran.

The path back towards the trees and away from the falls was moonlit and easy to follow.

The growl turned into a howl. It was more than a terrifying sound because it was in my head and I could feel what it felt: I felt hunger, I felt excitement, I felt joy and I felt hate. Waves of emotions washed my brain as it began to hunt me.

I ran along the path and into the trees. The path beneath the trees glowed even without the moonlight. I sprinted through the darkness.

Through the mind-link, I felt the shadow-beast reach the place where I had stood near the loch. I could smell my own scent in its nostrils. I felt the saliva fill its maw.

I began to find it hard to breathe. I was running too hard. I had to slow down, I had to, I couldn’t keep going at this pace. I’d exhaust myself and the beast would have me for dinner. I would need my strength to fight if it caught up to me.

<Courage/bravery/grit,> said the voice in my head. <Look/right-ways/observe.>

I looked and saw a silvery light deep among the trees. The same silvery light of the moonbow.

<Come/beacon/follow.>

In the stories, you’re told to never leave the path, but the glow was in the trees and I couldn’t see a path. I slowed to a jog (oh, how I wanted to run and run, faster and faster, not slower) and when I rounded a Rowan tree there was a narrow trail, edged by bushes, leading into the forest towards the light.

The hunger and menace and joy of the shadow-beast pressed into my thoughts.

I would be caught if I stayed on the path, and I didn’t want to be caught. Leaving the path was my only choice, my only hope. I ran onto the narrow trail where branches slapped me, grabbed at me, tried to trip me. A branch whipped the back of my hand. It stung. The bushes were thorny and hemmed me in on both sides. They offered no escape, no place to hide, only ensnarement and scratches. I followed the trail as it meandered through the trees. Sometimes I’d be running towards the light, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. Sometimes I couldn’t see the light at all until I made a turn and caught another glimpse of the glow. I had no idea in which direction I was running.

The shadow-beast loomed in my mind as it gained on me.

The trail turned and straightened. A bright light shone through a tangle of thorny branches ahead. I did not slow down, instead, I ran faster. At the last moment, I lifted my arms to cover my face and leapt. Thorns scratched and pierced my arms and legs and belly, my legs got tugged away from under me and then I was falling.

I landed on my arms and belly on soft springy turf. I lay there and gasped for breath.

I could smell blood, as if from the beast’s nostrils, my blood, and from the dark trees there came a howl of manic glee. I scrambled to my feet.

I stood in a circular clearing in the trees. In the middle of the clearing stood a horse. The horse’s shoulders were taller than my head. She was the source of the silvery light. It glowed around her head and flowed in rivulets down her neck and spread across her whole body. She was lit not by moon or sun but by light from another world. The edges of her outline did not seem to stay still, they moved and pulsed as if she could barely keep her shape. She turned her head to look at me and that’s when I saw the horn growing out of her forehead. It was the source of the light, the source of her majesty and power, the source of everything. She was more real, more there, than the grass and the trees. She stood super-imposed on top of reality.

She was Unicorn.

My eyes would not look away from her horn. The light on it pulsed, like breathing. It soothed me. Everything else but the light went away: my heavy breathing, the trees, my aching muscles, the moon, my pain, the shadow-beast that hunted me.

She knelt, one knee after the other, like bowing, and positioned her head to look at me with one eye.

<Mount/live/escape,> she said. An image of muddy red eyes appeared in my mind.

She turned her head so that I could no longer see the horn. I blinked. My breathing stayed calm and easy as I approached her.

The muscles under her pearly iridescent coat twitched. The light played over her curves and shifted like crashing waves. Her mane was white. Jagged streaks of blue light ran down each coarse strand of hair.

I grabbed two handfuls of mane and it crackled. All the hair on my body began to rise as I was filled with electricity.

The hunger of the shadow-beast forced its way into my mind again and pushed aside my newfound calm. I turned and saw, through the tangled bushes, the shadow-beast attempt to enter the clearing. It followed no path but ran straight towards me. It crashed through the undergrowth, snapping some branches, but many, more supple vines wrapped around it so that it became entangled. It heaved itself forward inch by straining inch.

I tightened my grip on her mane and threw my leg over her back. She began to rise, which threw my weight forward, and I thought I was going to fall over the top of her head. The ground already looked a long way down.

Then she surged forward and my body jerked back, my arms whipped straight, my fists filled with her electric mane. I pulled myself forward to lie on her back. As my chest and belly touched her I felt pulled down, attracted to her by an invisible force.

In two strides her hooves drummed out a dum-dumdum canter on the turf.

The shadow-beast roared. The sound echoed in my mind and then a moment later in my ears. I screamed my fear and defiance back at it. Below me, her body vibrated against mine as I heard and felt her answering neigh: loud and strident like a trumpet.

She heaved below me and then I was weightless, I felt like I was falling, but I stayed stuck to her back. I looked down through a gap between my arm and her neck and I saw a tangle of branches below us. And then we were down, and trees, lit by her glowing horn, flashed past in a strobed silvery blur.

Through her mane, I saw another wall of branches ahead. She didn’t slow and she heaved below me and we were airborne again, flying for a long second, and then her hooves struck the turf and we burst out of the forest and into the moonlight. We thud-thud-thudded through the long grass and then we were back on the path.

I saw the moon before us, bright and high in the sky. We were heading back toward the falls.

“No!” I shouted. “The valley, the falls! It’s a dead-end!”

<Straight/winding/turning,> she said. <Past/future/now.>

I could do nothing, stuck as I was to her back. I was not going to fall off. I couldn’t. So I found the rhythm of her gallop and willed my hands to relax their grip on her mane.

<Scent/smell/hunt,> she said with a mind-picture of me. <Forever/chase/kill.> A mind-picture of the shadow straining to escape the branches.

The crashing sound of Magus Falls grew like someone had turned up the volume. The path was a blur beneath us. We ran towards clouds of water mist lit by moonlight.

And in those clouds, I saw the moonbow. It was dim, barely there at all, as it arced across the falls. She headed straight for the center of the arch and galloped faster. Her hooves thudded on the packed earth and then all I could hear was the plashing of hooves on water. Spray soaked me as she ran over the surface of the loch.

The glow around her head brightened and the moonbow responded. It shone stark and bright, as real, as there, as my impossible mount. Rainbow colors projected out from the edges of the bow and painted the billowing mist in reds and oranges and yellows and greens and blues and indigos and violets.

The moonbow and the multi-colored mist shifted color again. No longer silver, but bluer.

The shadow-beast howled. Through the mind-link, I felt anger and disappointment. It didn’t want to lose the prey. All I wanted was for the howl to stop and for my mind to be my own again.

I felt her muscles tighten and bunch under me. They released their power and we leapt under the moonbow’s arch.

The mind-link with the beast cut off in mid-howl, one second there, the next, silent.

There was a moment of spinning, a moment of dizziness, a moment of confusion, a moment of nausea.

Then it was just bright, so bright I had to close my eyes and bury my head against her neck.

We struck ground (not water) and slowed to a walk: clip-clop clip-clop.

I opened my eyes. We were in the bright, late afternoon sunshine. The sun was warm on my skin. I held handfuls of her mane in my fists. There were no sparks. My thighs slipped and I realized I was no longer stuck to her coat.

She walked towards the trees and the roar of the falls diminished behind us.

“Wait, stop. The monster-,” I said.

<Un-truth/shadow-beast/behind,> she said. <Shadow-beast/future/ahead.>

“I don’t understand,” I said.

<Truth/girl-child/wisdom,> she said. <Come/hide/await.> A mind-image of me again. <Wait/clearing/pass.>

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

She said nothing.

It was cooler under the shadow of the trees. We walked on the path for a while and then diverted onto a side trail (a different one, I think, there was no Rowan this time). The bushes and branches and thorns did not touch her as we passed. She followed the winding trail back to a clearing. She walked to the center and then knelt without warning and I slipped forward, my arms and legs wrapped around her neck. I held on, fearful of falling over her head and touching the horn. Or being impaled on it.

Had this been her plan all along? Maybe it wasn’t the shadow-beast that hunted me, maybe it was her.

<Instinct/truth/perception,> she said <Moonbow/protection/fortune.> She tossed her head and I slipped further. <Live/girl-child/safe.>

I relaxed my legs and fell off the side of her neck and onto the short grass. It was good to be standing on the ground again; to be able to decide, on my own, where to go and what to do.

“Will you-”

She neighed, her message to be quiet was clear, even without mind-speak.

I recognized that neigh: it was the same sound I had heard earlier that afternoon when I had left the trees.

<Observe/girl-child/see,> she said. <Silent/hidden/mouse-like.> She nudged me with her soft muzzle towards the edge of the clearing. I shied away from the horn. I couldn’t look at it. I didn’t want to.

Around a tree at the edge of the clearing, I could see, by some luck or magic, a clear view all the way to the edge of the forest.

And on the path, right there, I saw myself. I was wearing the same red cap, the same blue jeans, the same walking boots, the same orange windbreaker.

It was me. A then-me.

Then-me stood on the path and looked into the trees. Was she wondering, as I had, what kind of animals lived in this valley? Then-me turned away and continued walking, having made her decision to go on to the falls. I lost sight of her as she became obscured by trees.

When I turned, the horn was right in front of me, a meter away and pointed at my chest. It was not glowing and it’s point looked infinitely sharp.

<Go/friends/return,> she said. <Silence/secrecy/ever-more.> The iridescent curving waves moved across her coat flared to brightness. She disappeared right in front of me.

<Girl-child/moonbow/life-gift,> she said and was no longer a presence in my mind.

I stood in the clearing and waited for something else to happen.

The trees around me were evenly spaced and large and old, and there were twelve of them. Between each trunk was the start of a trail, eleven in total. None had branches barring the way. Hadn’t all the trails been blocked by thorns and undergrowth last night? No, not last night, the night still to come. Maybe I wasn’t even in the same clearing.

I chose the trail closest to me and it led me back to the forest path where an earlier version of me had just walked. What would happen if I ran after her, to warn her?

I didn’t do that because that didn’t happen. I had no memory of meeting myself on the path. And if I didn’t remember then it didn’t happen. Right?

I hiked back down the valley to the campsite and my friends. I hurried and so made it back before it got too dark.

“How was it?” Carrie asked from beside the tent. Then she looked closer. “What happened, Jessie? You’re a mess!”

I looked down at the dirt and the grass stains and the bloody scratches. “Yeah.” I laughed, dragged my fingers through my hair. “I left the path and got lost. When I found it, it was too late so I came back. I never even got close enough to hear the falls.”

“Lost in the woods,” Billy said. He walked into camp with his arms full of firewood. “Well, I’m glad you un-lost yourself. Saved us the trouble of coming to rescue you!” Billy motioned at the firewood with his head. “Make yourself useful and grab a log.”

I took several large branches from the top of the pile in his arms.

“Let’s get up early and go see the falls tomorrow,” Carrie said.

“Okay,” I said, thinking of the shadow-beast. “Early is good. It’ll be better if we go together anyway.”

“Deal, as long as you don’t get lost again,” Billy said with a grin. “Now move it, we’ve got marshmallows to burn.”

 

* * *

About the Author

Jason Kocemba lives and writes in Kirkwall, Orkney and is the only male in a household of females (of which 2 are people, 2 are cats, and 1 a dog). He loves stories and is a lifelong consumer and creator of them. He is an optimist and has hope that he will learn from his mistakes (the Court of Self-delusion is still in session and the jury has yet to return with a verdict). If you like, you can find more on jasonkocemba.com.

Categories: Stories

Moon-Eye

Wed 1 Sep 2021 - 02:24

by Garick Cooke

“For a thousand years the dragon’s children had ruled unchallenged, but a new people had risen in the north, and they brought war to the draks.”

At six months, he ate his sister while they were both still inside their mother.

On the eve of his birth, then, he emerged fat and one-eyed, with the scars of his first fight still on his hide. For the sun-loving draks, a night birth was ill-omened. They were a cruel people, but even among them, infant cannibalism was a thing of the dark past. Thus, doubly ill-omened, he was named Moon-Eye, and he became untouchable.

* * *

In deep time, the skies dimmed and the world cooled. The draks, creatures of light and heat, weakened and dwindled. For a thousand years the dragon’s children had ruled unchallenged, but a new people had risen in the north, and they brought war to the draks.  For many years, the draks fought a long rearguard action, always retreating to the south. But, clannish and no longer fecund, they were defeated piecemeal, until only Moon-Eye remained.

He was then a drak of something over six hundred years, a lean and battle-hardened veteran. In his youth, he fought many duels over his name, and in the long war against the moles, he had been its most savage proponent. His scaly hide, once bright silver, was now scarred and gray. He haunted the hills, preying on any mole who ventured out alone. He carried a saber crafted in the olden times, when the draks still knew how to forge unbreakable alloys. His name became a fearful legend among the moles. But they were many and increasing, and he was alone.

He went south, seeking legends. The fine mansions of the draks had been pulled down, but here and there he found an isolated tower, or a house hidden in the hills, and he took what he could find. Some of the old books still contained the knowledge he needed. The way led ever farther south, farther than any drak had traveled in his lifetime. But, at last, he found what he sought.

* * *

The dragon slept under a mountain.

Time had worn his refuge down like an old tooth, and its approaches were choked with rubble and scrubby trees. Moon-Eye spent three days excavating the entrance. Within, he found a tunnel of dressed stone. He spent another day gathering deadwood to make torches and set off into the interior. In the heart of the earth, far beneath the dead peak, he entered a vast chamber whose extent he could not guess in the blackness. Here the dragon lay prone on a bed of rock, his scaly length seeming endless. Moon-Eye walked all the way around him and then sat down to rest. Then he burned certain herbs he had gathered on the mountainside and said certain words he had read in the old books, and he waited.

It began later, much later, with a creak and a shudder that pulled him out of a dreamless sleep. The ground shivered, and he got to his feet and lit a torch. More time passed. His torch had burned away almost to nothing when the voice came out of the darkness: a huge, ancient thing, as if the mountain itself were speaking.

“What’s this? A starved lizard?”

He raised the torch over his head. Far above, he saw a face looking down. The dragon’s eyes gleamed like liquid fire.

Moon-Eye drew himself up to his full eight feet. “I am Moon-Eye.”

The dragon blew out a contemptuous breath, and Moon-Eye was buffeted by a sooty wind.

“In my day, children were taller. Why have you wakened me? I was dreaming good dreams of fire and brimstone…”

“Your Bat-Winged Eminence, there is trouble.”

And Moon-Eye told the dragon of the centuries that had passed, of the dimming of the skies and the decline of the draks. And he told him of the moles.

“Hmmm,” said the dragon, and fell silent. He had lowered his head to rest on his great forepaws and closed his eyes. Again, Moon-Eye waited. After a time, the golden eyes reopened and fixed on him.

“I have searched far in my mind,” said the dragon. “You do not lie. My brothers and sisters are silent, my children are no more, and there is mischief afoot in the world. You did well to waken me, little one. Now bow your head.” The dragon touched him on the brow with a black talon like a scimitar. “See now, as I do! With the all-seeing gaze of your mind, and not your feeble senses. You are half-blind from birth, but now when your eye falls on the enemy, it will be as if you strike him with your sword…”

The death gaze, thought Moon-Eye. He had heard stories of such things existing in the distant past. He had thought them all lies.

“Go back to the surface and await me there,” said the dragon.

* * *

The following day the ground shook and there was a great crash, as of huge stones shifting, and the dragon emerged from his rocky lair to perch on the mountainside. When he spread his wings, there came a vast creaking sound, like the wind in a forest of great trees.

“It is well,” he said, flexing his pinions. “They will still carry me. Now, I will see about these moles. I will turn over their cities like anthills and dig them out of the ground. Then I will burn everything to a cinder. This world belonged to me, once. The moles will learn to fear me.” He laughed, a sound that caused Moon-Eye’s head to ache. “Now, it is beneath my dignity to crawl over the earth like a snake, but follow me as best you can, little one, and you shall have your vengeance.”

The wind from those great wings knocked Moon-Eye down and flattened him against the stony ground. When he was able to look up, the dragon was a dot in the sky, arrowing away to the north.

He climbed to his feet and began walking.

 

* * *

About the Author

Garick Cooke is a California native but a longtime resident of Houston, Texas, where he attended the University of Houston on a full scholarship, studying Biology and History. He has worked construction estimator for over 20 years. He has four dogs and enjoys writing science-fiction and fantasy in his spare time. He has previously self-published an anthology entitled Similia, but “Moon-Eye” is his first professional sale.
Categories: Stories

Mama’s Nursery

Wed 1 Sep 2021 - 02:23

by Gloria Carnevale

“Mama’s stomach was transparent as cellophane, and one could see directly into her. This is where the creature resided.”

Mama couldn’t afford to be careless this time. She needed to move them, and quickly. She had found the ultimate setting. There were small cabins scattered throughout the property, most hidden by tall pines. A building alongside of the creek was perfect for meetings and meals. But it was the abandoned infirmary, complete with an operating theatre, which convinced her. It was a pity that Monkey and Pug wouldn’t be joining them, for they had begun to show signs of maturing, and Mama couldn’t have that. Besides, she was certain that there would be some who had been left behind here, and Mama could give them life.

Yes, it was perfect. She’d move them here today.

* * *

Pug shifted under Monkey’s weight.  Monkey had been sleeping with her mouth open and Pug had slipped out during the night. They had been sleeping in an abandoned pool every evening since they had been left behind.

Monkey had cried uncontrollably when Mama left. Having known no other “mother,” she relied on Mama for everything.

Mama had tried to fix Monkey’s defect, to no avail. She didn’t have the right tools, the right anesthesia, nor the right knowledge. She had seen these birth defects before, and was hard-pressed to figure out what to do.

Mama herself had been abandoned, although that had been so many years ago that she vaguely remembered it. Her “adopted” father had been a physician of sorts; his life’s work was hidden from the outside world, which he found to be best under the circumstances.

He took Mama in and began a series of experiments on her that were meant to heal her affliction. He succeeded to an extent — on the outside she looked as normal as the next person. Two eyes, a nose and a mouth, arms, legs, torso… what else did one need? Mama’s hair was sparse around her head, and in some places it stood up in tufts. All in all, he felt that he had done a fine job making her presentable on the outside.

There was that one difficulty with getting the child inside of her to cooperate. Try as he would, he couldn’t figure out how to destroy it without destroying Mama.

* * *

Mama’s stomach was transparent as cellophane, and one could see directly into her. This is where the creature resided.

The creature required nothing more than to be left alone. It didn’t seem to need food, and it never grew. Yet it was there, silent, eyes watching all of the time, looking back and forth at the doctor’s every move.

Mama seemed nonplussed by it all, and went about her life as the doctor’s assistant as if the creature wasn’t there. But it was, and once Mama reached puberty, there were no more “experiments” to be done. The thin wails of the creature were too much for either Mama or the doctor to bear, so he decided to just let it alone. Oh, he had tried, and he had the scars to prove it. At one time he had tried going through Mama’s delicate parts to reach the creature and had his hand bitten with such force that he lost a finger. He had had to talk Mama through sewing it back on for him.

No, he wouldn’t be trying that again any time soon. If Mama was okay with it, then so was he. Besides, he had many defective beings with which he could practice and operate on. And he so loved his work. He gave new life to those who were afflicted and discarded, and allowed them to live with him on the property, far away from curious eyes.

Monkey was one such creature for whom the doctor had taken a liking.

She was diminutive — everything about her was perfectly formed in miniature. Her only affliction was Pug, that demonic snake that resided in monkey’s mouth.

The doctor couldn’t get within an inch of Monkey’s face without that god-awful snake slithering out and trying to bite him. Once he had grabbed it by the neck and tried to pull it out of her, but it somehow twisted itself around and bit him in the face. It took fifty-nine stitches to close the gaping wound that it left, not to mention the fact that he had to drink its antidotal venom to survive. He shuddered remembering.

As she got older, Mama became his assistant in all manner of surgeries because after all, these creatures needed constant attention as they had many medical issues that went along with their problems.

Mama enjoyed her work with the doctor, and trying out new techniques as they discovered them, always by trial and error.

She had an idea about operating on Monkey to rid her once and for all of the snake, but first she would need to run it by her mentor. If her hunch was correct, then it would only be a matter of time before every one’s afflictions would be resolved, even her own, although she didn’t mind that which lived within her. Quite the contrary, it was some comfort to know that she was never alone.

* * *

Mama surveyed the property on this fine morning of discovery. The doctor had told her stories of the great virus and how they had come to live in the rural outskirts of the city.

It had begun on the other side of the world, making its way across Europe and the oceans until it came to America, leaving death, destruction, and financial ruin. When the government decided to place everyone on house arrest within the next twenty-four hours, Mama’s grandparents had packed up their belongings and moved their family north to their summer camp, where they lived off the land far away from the deadly virus.

All went well for a time. As summer neared, her grandfather fished the streams with his sons, planted vegetables, and shot what they could for winter meat.

As far as her grandmother was concerned, it was an idyllic life-temporarily. The only oddity were the amount of woodland creatures who would seek shelter in and around their cabin. What with her grandfather and the boys using rifles daily, one would have thought that they would stay far away, but no, it appeared that they actually seemed to enjoy the company of humans, and it was not uncommon to find a woodchuck or a snake curled up alongside of you come morning.

And there were others, too. Some families who had their camps along the creek came seeking shelter form the cities and the virulent situation.

As the years passed there became a new problem to cope with. Several  women were giving birth to children with fantastic afflictions of quite an unordinary sort.

Mama’s grandmother was the midwife for the small community which had begun to grow. When her own daughter gave birth, she was there to attend, but was horror-stricken to find that the birthed infant had an infant-looking creature inside of her, inside of her stomach.

At first, her grandmother thought that it was twins, which can sometimes happen, and looked for a way to puncture the skin to release the creature, to no avail. Her daughter cried out to see her child, but her mother whisked it away, mumbling something about it not breathing.

Her grandmother wasted no time in bringing them both to the “doctor” to see what could be done.

“It’s the devil’s doing, for sure. Kill them both, and I’ll say that the baby died before it was born.”

The doctor had a bit of the macabre in him with a healthy dose of crazy, so he promised to do what was asked of him, and promptly took the child and her internal creature to his lab.

Mama thrived under the doctor’s care, and so did her creature. By now, many of the women who had fled as youngsters with their families were of adult age and giving birth to all sorts of anomalies.

Take, for example, the woman who had given birth to a little boy, who had arms similar to the front legs of a frog, with an enlarged throat and bulging eyes. His back was covered in a green-slimy patina, while his belly was bloated and white. He couldn’t speak, but made sounds that were not unlike a frog’s ribbit.

All of the infants born had afflictions, most of them were appendages of insects, amphibians, mammals, and birds which resided in the woods.

Mama had been the first child born with an affliction, and the doctor passed it off as a defect, but as other women gave birth, there was not one who birthed a single child without something attached to it, either externally or internally.

Generally speaking, the women were traumatized at these revelations, and more than happy to hand them over to Mama, as she became the new midwife for the colony.

Mama wasted no time in bringing them to the doctor’s “lab” for experiments and treatments. What the doctor was discovering as more afflicted were brought to him, was that their “afflictions” were rapidly growing tenacious – more than ever before.

The end result of their tenacity was the demise of the doctor.

One cool evening, Mama was summoned to assist in the birth of a young girl of fifteen, who had become pregnant by the toad boy. Although Mama had tried to hand out birth control to all of the girls, this one getting pregnant only solidified Mama’s beliefs that human birth control didn’t work on… non-humans. So there she was, this young girl, writhing around on the bed with her eyes glazed over, screaming for mercy, for unconsciousness, anything, to take away her agony.

Mama didn’t want to put her hand inside of the girl for fear of disturbing whatever was in there, so she called for the doctor, who, due to his lust for the bizarre and grotesque, was only too happy to comply.

There was no time for him to don a glove, so he put his hand up into her, and felt around.

She ceased her screams, and went limp.

The doctor continued to feel around and probe, forcing his hand further up until he was in to his elbow.

Perplexed, he asked Mama if she was really pregnant, because he didn’t feel anything at all in there.

“Of course she is, keep feeling around. The girl was swollen with something.”

He continued his exploring, and then took his arm and hand out of her.

“Nothing. I’m not sure what is going on.”

In that moment, both of them looked at his arm, which was covered with spiders, all biting him instantaneously. They were recluse spiders, the deadliest of all.

The doctor fell hard upon the floor, as the spiders scattered.

Mama wasted no time in getting her charges moved. She had long suspected that the animals were the ones doing the impregnating, but she never had discussed it with the doctor. Too late now.

She sighed as she left Pug and Monkey. She had wanted to run her thoughts about them past the doctor as well, but never mind. If they were as strong as she was suspecting the creatures were becoming, then they’d be fine on their own.

She patted her stomach, and her creature moved. Mama had never really acknowledged her affliction as she was always busy with the doctor and his work.

She felt a wetness and looked down.

Her skin was leaking fluid as immediate pains shot up to her chest. The fluid became a flood, and within seconds a whoosh of water gushed from her and her creature slipped out.

Mama dropped to her knees, and then rolled into the grass. It was over.

* * *

Some people in town believed the house was haunted.

It had been a vacation spot for city folk, much like a B&B of today, but its last stint as a boarding house had taken its toll. It stood up on a hill, the shingles on the octagonal roof green with moss and sliding downward like a sinking vessel.

In the front yard, vestiges of large ceramic planters and a lily pond remained. At one time the facades of the planters had angels and cherubs in raised relief, but wings and eyes had broken off giving them an eerie, lost look, as if they were waiting for something to take them to their final resting place.

There was a lone concrete bench made for two strategically placed facing west, so one could see the sun set over Illinois Mountain.

Towards the back of the house there remained an Olympic-size pool, void of water, leaves swirling along the bottom to the beat of the wind, as if they were trying to escape down the pool’s drain. Several lounges and chairs were scattered around the edge of the pool, the canvas straps of the seat webbing blowing against the metal frames. To the left of the pool stood a concession stand, the ghost of an old coca-cola cooler and a built-in can opener standing still. To the right of the pool were ancient bath houses, and as the wind whispered through them, one could imagine hearing shower water and wet towels.

During snow-covered winter afternoons, neighborhood children would ride toboggans down the hill, laughing and making snowballs to throw into the pool. But now, October, the only sound one could hear on an afternoon when the shadows drew long was the wind blowing through the empty house shell.

Parents warned their children not to go there at this time of year. “Hunters,” they’d say, “it’s not safe now. Wait until the season is over.” But the children knew better. Stories travel and linger in a small town, and most of them remain.

They had heard about Lilly, the proprietress of the boarding house. That kind of story is the type that does linger and becomes larger than life, or death.

Lilly had inherited the house from her parents who had kept it as a summer sojourn. Since Lilly was single and had no intention of partnering up, she kept the nine guest rooms neat and well-appointed by periodically rearranging the furniture and accessories according to her moods.

It was on one such mission that she discovered the dumbwaiter inside of one of the closets. Curious, she pulled the ropes down and what came up was to haunt her rest of her life.

He, or she, Lilly had never reconciled the gender, sat on the base of the dumbwaiter, its face shining and cherubic, eyes glistening violet, and smiling widely. Its straight hair was growing in tufts of black. Its age was indefinable and it bore no marks of abuse or malnourishment. Lilly’s eyes locked with his. Her fascination grew as their eyes continued to explore one another, yet remain immobile. Suddenly, its round arms began to move away from its sides, and upward towards Lilly. As it put its outstretched arms towards her in a gesture that said “pick me up,” Lilly took two steps back. The dumbwaiter fell towards the basement from whence it had come.

Every day of her life thereafter, Lilly was to second guess what would have happened if only she had reached out to it. She knew one thing for certain: nothing would ever be the same.

 

* * *

About the Author

Gloria Carnvevale’s writing has been a massage for her soul since she was a teenager. She supposes that the Hudson River has a lot to do with her craft, as she walks the river trails to form ideas and characters in her fictional works. She is the author of The Pork Chop in the Window (The Round House Press, 2014), “Epiphany of Maturity” (Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol.3, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2014), and has had both non-fiction and fiction included in WvW Anthology, (Soul Garden Press, 2015), In Celebration of Sisters (Trisha Faye, 2017), In Celebration of Mothers (Trisha Faye, 2016), Mothers of Angels (2019), Chicken Soup for the Soul: Believe in Miracles (2020), What But the Music Anthology (Gelles-Cole, 2020).

Her page on FB is The Pork Chop in the Window where she periodically posts a Vlog. She is an active member of the Wallkill Valley Writers (WvW) in New Paltz, NY, an affiliation of the Amherst Writers and Artists.

“Mama’s Nursery” is a departure from the genres in which she writes. She credits the COVID Pandemic for enhancing her nightmares.

Categories: Stories

The Squirrelherd and the Sound

Wed 1 Sep 2021 - 02:18

by Emmie Christie

“Usually the squirrels found one or two space acorns a day. The next day, they found seven.”

Catherine didn’t much care for her job.

It wasn’t that the squirrels gave her any lip. They had dental plans, 401Ks, and the whole caboodle after all. The Sound, though, that gave her the shudders.

The animals dug in the fenced-off area of the forest. A sign warned off any journalists or teenagers of biohazards. Not that any would come by. The government had everyone and their aunt training for evacuation. Catherine chewed a big wad of mint gum to keep herself focused.

One squirrel – she herded 112 of them, she couldn’t keep track of their names – chittered and skittered in a circle, then held up a space acorn as if it held up Shakespeare’s skull. The nut had the extraterrestrial shade, the color of space without stars, a black so dark it seemed to swallow the paw that held it.

The other squirrels all stopped and wrinkled their noses in jealousy. The squirrel turned the space acorn over in its paws, puzzling over it, running its claws over the surface.

The squirrel pushed, then rotated the top of it like a Rubik’s cube. It spun and the animal tapped a swift, complicated pattern over it. This went on for a minute or so, and Catherine steeled herself.

The space acorn opened with The Sound. Or more, the absence of sound, that silence so complete it roared in the ears. The Sound stole some of the green from the trees, some of the mint from her tongue. Catherine unwrapped another piece with shaking hands and stuffed it in her mouth.

The squirrel looked over at her. “Another one for the colonists, eh?”

The Sound continued, sipping in bits of Earth. Bits of the squirrel holding the acorn. Catherine looked away. After a few moments, The Sound stopped, and the squirrel disappeared altogether.

Catherine shuddered. She stalked over to the space acorn, now opened and empty. It showed a bit of New Earth as if through a peephole. She picked it up, making sure her long gloves covered the skin on her wrists, and trudged over to the wall that used to be the inside of a barn.

Behind her, the squirrels resumed digging.

Catherine gritted her teeth. The wall had 49 space acorns taped there, and together they had sucked in all the red of the barn and the solidity of its structure, the green of the nearby forest, sunlight, and even the earthy scent of soil. She hadn’t realized that dirt smelled like anything until its absence. Nothing except the Sound existed there – that inhalation, that isolation – and the space acorns that fit together into a mosaic showing a growing vision, no, a growing portal, to New Earth.

Her heavy shoes and the weights on her arms and legs stopped her from getting sucked in. She found the spot where the space acorn fitted. It matched what the others showed, a section of blue sky and a tree branch. She duct taped the nut in place and the Sound increased, a roaring in her ears, and the trees behind her creaked and groaned. It pulled at her and she crouched low to keep her balance – she’d never had to do that before – and tried not to think about the fact that fifty seemed an auspicious number.

She stepped away, going back to her herd. They dug with a new sense of purpose. Perhaps another would find their space acorn today. The strange element had been discovered by the first squirrel just two years ago, nestled in the Earth’s subcutaneous layer, giving every squirrel speech, and urgency, and desperation.

“Hey,” she called. One or two looked up. “Why do you want to find them, anyway?”

She asked them once a day. Just to see if they’d ever give her an answer. As their squirrelherd she thought she should try. A herder protected the herd; that was the job. And every day they told her the same thing.

“To build the gate.”

The government had made them full citizens, let them apply for any jobs they wanted. All they wanted was to dig.

Catherine could understand the concept of burying herself in a job. She’d worked three part-times through college along with a full-time boyfriend. It had helped her avoid the nights of empty space, when there was just the couch and the flickering lamp beside her, and the inevitable feeling of detaching like a leaf and falling, falling, falling.

At the end of the day, Catherine led the squirrels along the path, back towards their little ten-foot houses with their tiny stoves and fridges. She’d thought the newspaper ad had meant this, guiding them back to their pens like they were still animals without thoughts or feelings. But that wasn’t it, not really. The squirrels traveled to and from the digging area whether she escorted them or not.

She should’ve known. Job descriptions were never accurate. There were always extra side roles that no one else wanted to bother with, the gritty, thankless tasks that, when done right, most never knew about.

* * *

Usually the squirrels found one or two space acorns a day. The next day, they found seven.

The wall took in more of the forest, more of the barn’s structure. A blanket of ivy withered on a tree in ten seconds into a gray, shrunken thing. When she went to place the acorns on the barn wall, she had to crouch for several seconds to keep from being pulled in. Tingles ran down her spine when she looked too quickly at it, as if something had just moved outside the frame.

“Frickin people,” she said. “Who wants this to happen, anyway?”

She’d seen the news, of course. Watched the simulations. Their town received the transmissions like all the others. The asteroid was coming in thirty years and nothing they threw at it would stop its course. But did that mean everyone had to give up and throw all of their eggs into one new planet? Just throw in the towel, throw up their hands, and throw away any power of possibility that maybe, just maybe, someone could catch a glimmer of genius and figure out how to stop it?

But keeping her head down meant that she had a house on 4th St, and a steady job, and a way to support herself without having to live with someone that thought her body more of a drive-thru than a temple.

Catherine gritted her teeth. The squirrels dug with more urgency, as if their lives depended on it.

* * *

She missed theatre.

She used to herd goats, back before the world lost its collective head. A solitary position, and she had loved when theatre troupes passed through their small town. She missed breathing in the same air as fifty other people in the town square. Something electric zipped through such a crowd, the anticipation of something shared, of a powerful mutual feeling.

Theatre couldn’t happen, of course, when all the actors and jugglers and contortionists now trained with the rest of Earth to live on another world. So, Catherine talked with the squirrels to distract herself.

“Romeo thought Juliet was dead,” she told them. “And drank the poison. And died. And she woke up and saw he was dead and killed herself. Isn’t that sad?”

“Seems unnecessary,” said one squirrel with a red zigzag pattern along his back. She’d begun to recognize them as their numbers dwindled faster and faster. Now there were 70. Zigzag talked more than the rest.

“Well, that’s Shakespeare in a nutshell. Want some?” She offered a piece of gum. He took it.

“This is good,” he said. “The mint. Really strong. But good.”

Catherine fiddled with the empty wrapper. “Don’t you think that maybe all this is unnecessary?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. What if someone figured out a way to stop the asteroid? Would you stop digging?”

Zigzag was quiet for a moment. The other squirrels continued to dig. They were a little farther away and maybe couldn’t hear the conversation.

“We build the gate,” he said.

“But – why should you have to? You have feelings, too, you’re a person. Not human, but a person.” She tore her wrapper up in strips, then into tiny bits, and let them flutter to the ground. “I know it kills you when you open those acorns. I know it, don’t lie to me.”

The portal seemed to suck more in each day. The leaves hadn’t even had a chance to fall before New Earth appropriated them, a parasite squirming in its guts, draining its lifeblood. The sky had grayed, like someone’s eyes shading when their mood shifted, like when they said they didn’t love you anymore after a few shots of vodka, or like when they traced your scars and asked, “Why didn’t you finish the job,” after a few more.

“Isn’t it better than feeling all of this?” Zigzag jerked his furry head at one of the few green trees left around them. “Isn’t it too much, all the time?” He took out the gum from his mouth. “Like this. Humans must be used to the taste, but it’s so strong.”

Catherine sat up. The saliva in her mouth had pooled; she’d forgotten to swallow while he talked. He’d said so much more than she’d expected. “You mean – you’d rather die? Even if it was for no reason at all, not even opening the portal, but just because?”

Zigzag dug some more. His voice floated to her after a few agonizing minutes. “We woke up like Juliet, and found we had emotions,” he said. “It was too much.”

He refused to say anything more.

* * *

The space acorns didn’t register on any scientific equipment, almost like they didn’t exist until the squirrels found them. And only the squirrels could open them, as if thousands of years of cracking Earth acorns and walnuts had trained them for this moment in history.

Had the space acorns always been there, or had they just appeared? No one knew. They did know that each opened a small vacuum, a tiny wormhole, sending power and life to another planet. Scientists had triangulated the planet’s position and monitored its levels and had found that the more “fuel” – the more color, scent, taste and texture – sent to the new planet via the portals, the more habitable the new planet became. The more like Earth. Like a copy and paste.

And so, the grand mission to build the gate. Awakened squirrels built twelve other gates around the world sending power and life to the new planet, to New Earth, they called it.

Just eleven squirrels left in her herd.

Catherine slogged back and forth from the old barn wall, bracing against the pulling wind, against the roaring silence of the Sound. The portal displayed a clear blue sky, a yellow sun, and green forest. She could jump right into it. Maybe she should. That would finish the job. It wasn’t habitable yet, not yet, scientists said.

Why did she fight this? It wasn’t like she had a Ph.D. in science or astronomy. She wasn’t the sharpest cheddar in the dairy section. Instead of going to college in the city, she’d been a goddamn goatherd, and look what she did now. She held the next space acorn up to tape it in position.

Something caught her eye. Something on the edge of the gate. She stopped herself just in time and didn’t react, just waited to see if it would show itself. The Sound increased.

A mouth. A maw. The trees had teeth. The sky lashed back and forth. The sun was an eye.

She dropped the space acorn and ran.

* * *

She shivered in her house on 4th St. The gray skies and soundless air had spread through the whole forest, pulsing at the edge of town. She didn’t want to go back.

What good would she do, anyway? What business did she have trying to do anything at all? A herder protected the herd, but did any of it matter when they would all die one way or another, when her job was making sure they died? She was the kind of person who followed orders, who kept her head down, whose only rebellion in life had been leaving him –

The curtain rose in her mind. She breathed in, imagining that collective inhale of anticipation, of sharing something bigger than herself and her fears.

There was strength, in that unity. There was protection in it. Protection from oneself, and the fear of entropy, of the curse of curling in on yourself like a hot iron and imploding.

She shot up from her couch and ran out the door. Towards work. Towards the portal and The Sound and that thing.

* * *

She hadn’t herded the squirrels that morning, but the last loyal nine had of course showed up, as they had every day. She searched for Zigzag, found him, and breathed in relief.

The Sound echoed through the empty clearing, through the withering trees surrounding them.

“Hey!” she said, to Zigzag, to the rest of them. “We never got used to it, you know!”

They all poked their heads up. “What?” One of them asked, a little one who called herself Becky.

“Us humans,” she said. “Emotions. We’ve never gotten used to them.”

Their heads swiveled, looking at each other. She strode past, towards that gorgeous New Earth, the almost complete portal, and crouched down in her heavyweight boots to keep from being sucked in.

“I know you’re there,” she said.

It surfaced like an impression through a mold. A cosmic mouth and teeth. A monster of a planet sucking at the life of another. A parasite.

“I know you.”

It grinned, and The Sound swept through the forest, reaching further, draining the sound of her boots on the gray earth, the last hint of mint on her tongue, the tackiness of sweat from her palms.

“You’re the same as staring at laundry and trying to get up, but never being able to. You’re the same as feeling a knife cut and wanting it, because it’s a feeling, isn’t it? But it’s not; it’s the same old shit of just wanting to feel, and at the same time you can’t because it’s too strong, too much, too loud!”

It pulled her closer. She stumbled, knocked down to her elbows, but spread her palms on the ground for grip.

“You’re the same as when he said I’m not enough.” She crawled forward on her hands and knees. “The same as when he said I was too much.”

The Sound translated into words. It said, “The asteroid is coming. You can’t avoid it. Isn’t it better to give in now? Avoid all that hurt and suffering? I really just want to help.”

Catherine flipped it the bird. “If it’s all so bad, then you wouldn’t be trying to take it for yourself, you greedy son of a bitch.”

Its eye flicked to the side.

Behind her, in the clearing, Zigzag had found a space acorn. He trembled, holding it, almost dragged towards the portal hundreds of feet away.

“No!” Catherine shouted. “Fight it!”

He rotated it, pressed the complicated patterns, but then his movements slowed. He stopped, hesitating.

“I gave you sentience!” The Sound said. “I show you where to dig! I gave you purpose, where you had none before!”

Zigzag looked at his fellow squirrels. They huddled around him. Some held their paws over their ears. He threw the space acorn on the ground and smashed it with his foot paw.

The Sound shuddered, and screamed, and writhed.

“It’s big enough!” It said and its maw crawled forward on centipede legs towards the portal. “My seeds have grown quite enough for me to come through and consume this world!”

Catherine closed her eyes and thought of theatre.

Every play had a moment where the enthrallment was complete. The actors ceased being strangers and the story held all the gasps of the audience. A moment of too-muchness so that it hurt to feel, but the heart loved it all the more because that’s what it was made for.

She stood up, braced against the pull, unmoving, and the roaring of silence tried to reach through to her, to drain her away, to detach her like a leaf and float her to the ground.

But she stood, protecting the herd behind her. There was strength in numbers, in not being alone. There was strength in the herd.

The Sound – the maw on legs, the intergalactic parasite, the Thing that had wormed its way to Earth – retreated back into the portal. “I’ll come through eventually,” It said in a whine. “Many of my portals sprouted on your planet. My seeds are all grown up, and they lead me to you. I’m your chance of dying early, of avoiding the dread of waiting! Don’t you want it to end?”

Catherine swept her gaze over the squirrels behind her. They glared at the thing, at the Sound. It retreated further and decreased to a low static.

Zigzag said, “Don’t drink the poison, Catherine.”

She smiled. “He’s right. You don’t get to talk to us like that.” She took a step forward. “Not anymore.”

Zigzag came up. The other squirrels followed. The Sound wheezed, and wheedled, but stayed far away from the portal as if terrified of their mutual inspiration, of their collective breaths, of their unity. Catherine and the squirrels tore the portal down.

 

* * *

About the Author

Emmie Christie graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop, class of 2013. Her work tends to hover around the topics of feminism, mental health, cats, and the speculative such as unicorns and affordable healthcare. In her spare time, she likes to play D&D and go out line dancing.

Categories: Stories

Palmerino’s Dream

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:07

by Joanna Galbraith

“Word spreads quickly about the Festival di Notte and every animal in Florence is cordially invited.”

In the Florentine hills below Fiesole, where the land is quilted with olive groves and stitched with high stone walls, where every house has dark green shutters and facades of yellow yolk; there lives the rooster of Villa di Notte who crows throughout the day.

Lustily squawking as he struts his stuff, no one understands him apart from the chickens.

‘Hush,’ they coo as he begins to crow. ‘Today he begins the Seventh Circle of Hell.’

It is the rooster’s dream to reach Paradiso; His father only made it as far as Purgatorio.

Sometimes the villa dog comes down to listen; scratching his back on the dry stone wall. He cannot follow what the rooster says (for like most dogs he does not speak Fowl) but he enjoys the camaraderie that comes with each show. Even the olives stop growing when the old rooster crows.

Now this dog is a proud fellow with a thick Shepherd’s mane. Eyes like two toffees: brown, melting stones. His name is Palmerino. He wishes it were not.

‘Oh to be a Leonardo, a Michelangelo, a great Cesare. Anything would be better than such a limp Palmerino.’

‘You should be grateful,’ scolds the plump villa cat. She speaks perfect Hound. She can speak Wild Boar, too.  ‘I am called cat. Nothing fancy about that.’

Sadly, the inhabitants of Villa di Notte do not sense Palmerino’s despair. They think his pout looks like a smile, his grimace just a grin. They think he likes to hear his name. They shout it all the time.

‘Don’t be hurt,’ consoles the cat. ‘They don’t mean to be unkind.  Besides, you know how little they understand about their villa world.’

Palmerino nods at the cat’s prudent words: he knows that she is right. How can they know about his name when they know so little else? Like how their sheep play Blind Man’s Bluff amongst the cypress trees or how their goats enjoy pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey although the donkey is far less keen!

Or how their chickens are so erudite, their rooster so verbose.

And that they have a cat with more tongues than lives and a dog with a lofty dream. A dream that extends far beyond his name — a dream to reach the sky. To stand up high on his own hind legs and walk a steady mile.  To shake the paws of all his friends instead of sniffing bums. Not that he minds the sniffing part (he quite likes it truth be told) but he knows it lacks sophistication; it just isn’t how it’s done.

‘Yes indeed,’ sighs Palmerino to himself. ‘How can they know I need a more gallant name if I am to walk upon my hind?’

* * *

As it turns out Palmerino is not the only dog who wishes he stood tall. The dark stone streets are full of such creatures, hankering to drink their morning espressos from tiny porcelain cups or to lean, cross-legged, at Trippa Bars while swallowing down their lunch. Each animal is proud of their Florentine home – of their city’s glorious pedigree. They know of the Renaissance from a time gone by.  They dream of the Renaissance still to come; a rebirth of sorts for all animal kind when the light from their souls will finally shine.  A time when they will at last create.  A time that has not yet come.

They are patient though, these aspiring artists, as they wait for their beautiful day.  For they know how simple human folk really are (despite their invention of algebra) and how dangerous this can be.  Just look what happened to the poor Russian bears that tried to stand before their time; strapped into skates, dressed in pink tutus, condemned to circus life.

No. These Florentine animals will not make this mistake. They are content to wait until the time is right and steal any opportunities that they can.

Like Sunday nights at Bar Café Mingo where they meet to exchange ideas. Owned by a Perugian with a heart spun from silk, he lends his key to a wolfhound called Basso without a single word. He understands that these animals need to meet. Need to express their animal souls. He doesn’t even mind the muddy prints they leave around his cups or that occasionally an enthusiastic tail may break a glass — for so too can a careless arm

Now here in Bar Café Mingo all the animals come to stand upon their hinds. There are the cats who paint with their motley paws and the Arctic Hares who throw clay pots. There are the dogs with a penchant for archeology who bring in their latest digs and the sculpting frogs that spend their days in mud perfecting the animal form. There are the Beatnik goats clapping out their rhythms; the spiders weaving tapestries.  All celebrating together in a small Oltrano bar while the Florentines peacefully sleep.

Palmerino is a regular; he is good friends with Basso, but the villa cat she never comes.  She much prefers to stay at home and enjoy the open air. Besides her father was a rather famous poet who used to cause trouble in the bar. Not for his poems (though somewhat provocative in themselves); he was an alcoholic too. The cat is afraid of what a whiskey and cream might do to her as well.

‘So how was last night?’ she asks Palmerino whenever Monday morning rolls round again.

‘Wonderful. A flock of migrating geese dropped by and honked in a capella Holst’s – Mars, The Bringer of War. Can you imagine? Then they sang a piece which they had composed themselves during their long flight south. Quite spectacular really.’

‘I wish I could have heard it,’ sighs the cat wistfully, resting her head on her well-groomed paws.

‘You really should come to the bar some time.’

The cat shakes her head; the memory of her inebriated father swinging from bar room shutters is still too raw for her.

‘It’s a shame we can’t do something away from the bar. In the open air perhaps.’

‘Like a festival?’

Palmerino furrows his brow. ‘Yes, exactly.’

‘A festival would need a lot of space.’

‘There’s plenty of room out here.’

The cat shakes her head again. Visions of skating bears flash through her mind. ‘Oh no, the villa folk are kindly people, but they would never understand.’

Palmerino pouts.

‘Unless,’ muses the cat with a thump in her tail. ‘Unless we wait until the Dolomites.’

‘The Dolomites?’

The cat rolls her eyes. Sometimes Palmerino can be very slow.

‘You know when the villa folk go to the Dolomites. They do it every year.’

Palmerino’s tail begins to wag. Of course, the Dolomites! Ever year the villa folk go to the mountains for five days. Normally they take him when they go on holidays but never to the Dolomites. Apparently one of their Aunts is allergic to his fur and she makes a lot of fuss.

‘I shall announce it next Sunday,’ shouts Palmerino in great glee.

The cat raises a paw to the front of his nose.

‘Ssh my excitable friend, not so fast!  At least let me find out first when the Dolomites will be.’

* * *

Word spreads quickly about the Festival di Notte and every animal in Florence is cordially invited.  Even the castorino who live down by the Arno and are known for their less than salubrious smell!

‘There is plenty of room,’ Palmerino enthuses to the bar crowd. ‘Olive groves, hay barns, a swimming hole as well. We shall walk, we shall dance, we shall touch the moon with our paws.’

Both he and the villa cat work tirelessly to prepare. They arrange with the pigeons to string up fairy lights; they speak with the mosquitoes about humming Habanera.  A horse chef is invited to whip up delicious treats although she cannot make them by herself as her shoes are far too awkward.  Instead she employs some local rats with nifty, little hands to work as sous chefs in her stable kitchen; to follow what she says. She also invites a herd of local bulls to come toss great salads in the air and a family of squirrels come in to crack nuts and unscrew jam jar lids.

* * *

Finally, the day comes when the villa folk are to leave.  Palmerino slumps glumly while they pack their bags – just as any loyal dog should always do!

‘Not too glumly’ hisses the villa cat. ‘They might take you after all.’

Immediately Palmerino starts smiling instead. He trots to the car with a wag in his tail and watches, head tilted, until the car pulls away.

‘Now,’ he whoops joyously. ‘Let the festival begin.’

Soon the animals start arriving in droves, flocks and herds. Dogs walk gaily, paw-in-paw, hind-upon-hind, musing wisely about the speed of light.

‘Well of course the neutrino can go much faster. I have tested it myself.’

Pigs don party frocks spun by spiders. Chickens count eggs before their laid. The ducks perform Swan Lake to rapturous applause.  Champagne spills over and flutes are broken. They prove too delicate for animal hands.  But the shards are soon melted down and blown into glass jewels by a troupe of fireflies.

By the third night the entire villa is in disarray, but it is a delightful sort of chaos. The lady dogs are wearing waistcoats; the men are in high heels. A fox has come up with a new kind of trot. A frog has learned to jive. The rooster has finally reached Paradiso; he plans to tackle William Shakespeare next.

Palmerino watches with a puffed out chest. He feels so tall he can reach the moon.

‘It’s a success,’ he barks joyously to his fellow host.

‘Aye,’ replies the villa cat who has been learning Scottish from a highland cow.

Suddenly, however, a bright light shines down the road.  Two flying saucers is the first supposition, but alas it is something far more alarming than this. The villa folk. Returning early? Apparently the allergic aunt found a stray dog hair in her soup.

The cat quickly ushers the animals out the back gate while Palmerino slumps frozen in his spot. His head is slung low though his heart is undefeated.

The villa folk cannot believe their eyes. Their house, their garden an unspeakable sight.  Smashed up plant pots everywhere, spilt vats of wine, trodden in food, sagging grape vines. Sculptures made of cow manure. Intricate mosaics designed out of seeds. A woven tapestry of wild, blooming flowers. Remnants of equations scratched out on barn walls.

They search for poor Palmerino with his innocent, brown eyes.

‘Aw come here,’ they say kindly while ruffling his sticky head. ‘Fancy being caught up in such terrible chaos. Such terrible vandalismo! Brave doggy, good doggy let us give you a bath.’

And Palmerino is bathed and groomed and fed though nothing feels as good as standing on hind legs.

* * *

The following morning Palmerino wakes from a kaleidoscopic dream and ventures out into the garden. Everything has gone. Nothing remains. In the field burns a giant bonfire, almost touching the sun.

‘Next year Palmerino’ the villa folk say. ‘You will come to the Dolomites with us.’

And Palmerino pouts though they think it’s a grin.

‘O don’t be sad,’ consoles the villa cat. ‘They don’t mean to be unkind. Besides you know how little they understand about their villa world.’

 

* * *

Originally published in Stupefying Stories

About the Author

Joanna Galbraith (she/her) was born in Australia but currently lives in Tuscany with her two cats – Pirate and Dalmazio. She has written about singing fish, humming whales, and dancing polar bears as well as the occasional story about vengeful dustbins and eight-fingered snowflake spinners. Her work has been published in numerous publications, including the highly-acclaimed Clockwork Phoenix anthology series.
Categories: Stories

Miss Smokey

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:06

by Diana A. Hart

“According to the President, we’re just animals. And thanks to his Supernatural Registration Act, I’d been downgraded from NOAA researcher to Park Service mascot.”

The squeals of the horde grew closer. I pulled in a breath, thick with wood and old newsprint, and reared onto my hind legs. My knees ached as I staggered to the center of the room. Standing upright was a breeze as a woman, but I was in bear-form, and grizzlies sure as hell aren’t meant to walk that way. My muzzle wrinkled as I pawed my wide-brimmed hat into place and braced for impact.

A pack of first-graders rounded the corner, flapping coloring books and screeching like howler monkeys on espresso. I snorted. They made a beeline for the menagerie of stuffed wildlife that lined the visitor center walls. Somehow the National Park Service expected coarse rope and a burnt wood “Do Not Touch” sign to stem the tide. It never worked. I cleared my throat as the grade-school piranhas reached for their taxidermied victims. The horde turned toward me, and eyes and mouths went wide.

A girl with mussed hair and a Last Unicorn t-shirt raised a chubby finger. “It’s—”

“That’s right,” I said. Well, rumbled, really. Being a grizzly kind of screws your “inside voice.” I jabbed a paw at them. “Remember, kids: Only you can prevent forest fires.”

A collective screech hit my ears. I winced and then they were on me. Most were well behaved, content to bounce up and down and jabber at me as if I were some woodland Santa Claus, but there’s always those few who mistake me for a jungle gym. By the time Kelsi and the chaperones arrived, a pair of boys clung to my shoulders and somebody dangled from my ruff. Their prim, proper, perfectly human teacher just laughed and took pictures.

I clenched my jaw and glowered at the woman. Her heavily moussed curls showed no signs of abuse, and her dress was shoeprint-free. Oh no, her little angels wouldn’t dare treat a normie like this, but shifters? A boy stuck his finger in my nose. I sneezed and wrestled him off my shoulder and plopped him on the floor. According to the President, we’re just animals. And thanks to his Supernatural Registration Act, I’d been downgraded from NOAA researcher to Park Service mascot.

The remaining shoulder-percher tried to steal my hat. Cooing over his cuteness, one of the chaperones blinded me with a camera flash. My pulse rose. I slapped a paw on top of my hat and weighed mentioning they were technically photographing a topless woman. I knew from experience it’d stop the pictures. I also knew it shrank my paycheck.

Instead I bit my tongue and locked eyes with Kelsi. The humanoid, five-foot-six raccoon had a child wrapped around each leg and her Stetson hung akimbo. My brow creased. What the heck is it with kids and hats? She shook her head and mouthed “Get on with it.”

I took a deep breath and bellowed over the din, “Do you know what the number-one cause of forest fires is, Ranger Rick?”

One of Kelsi’s leg-limpets wiped his nose on her calf. Her tail puffed from irritated to “just-shoot-me-now.”

“I dunno, Smokey,” she said, sticking to the godawful script.

I put a paw on my hip and frowned. It didn’t take much acting. My knees were screaming. “Well, that’s no good.” I flashed a sharp-toothed grin at the pair still yanking my fur. Their faces paled. “Do you know?” They just slid to the floor. My muscles unknotted. Finally. I rolled my shoulders and turned to the horde. “Can anybody tell Ranger Rick the number-one cause of fires?”

All of the kids babbled their guesses, including a shrill cry of “dragons.” My smile turned just a bit real.

The teacher finally settled her class in neat, cross-legged rows so Kelsi and I could give our presentation on fire safety, conservation, and how feeding the bears got people mauled. I’d done the routine so many times my brain just clicked to autopilot and let me watch the crowd during our show. Usually when Kelsi started juggling cans and tossing them in a recycle bin, the kids’ attention would drift, but every once in a while, you’d get that one child whose gaze stayed bright, boring into us with a hungry fire. Most wanted to be Rangers or scientists. Others were happy just seeing fellow shifters flash fur after the Registry.

My shoulders slumped. Today was just window-gazers and coloring enthusiasts.

* * *

After the Hoh Visitor’s Center closed, I shifted back to human form. Having thumbs and an athletic build was a welcome change from “nature’s tank.” I traded oversized trousers for human garb, grabbed my gear from my locker, and dashed for the trail, my grizzly-brown locks whipping in the wind. I grinned as the air kissed my face. There were a few hours of daylight left, enough to take some readings of the river if I hurried.

By the time I reached my favorite spot — a fast-flowing curve of water, shielded from intrusion by a steep hike and moss-covered hemlocks — the light had faded to a pale orange blush. Looming night and the glacier-fed river chilled the summer air. Goosebumps spread over my skin as I crunched along the gravel bar. A goldfinch sang somewhere along the far bank and the scent of evergreens and wet earth flooded my senses. My muscles relaxed as nature’s perfume washed away memories of pulled fur, sticky fingers, and painfully boring scripts.

I headed for a fire-downed hemlock. The charred tree was over a hundred feet long, trailing through the woods, across the bank, and into the river. I set my pack beside the dead giant and admired its blanket of ferns and spindly saplings. My breath slowed in quiet awe. Even in death the trees give life. Snags like this one allowed fresh growth and, when they dipped into the water, sheltered fish and other aquatic fauna. It was the latter I was really interested in.

I pulled out a flow meter and stake, then waded into the river. Liquid ice hit my calves. I gasped. Good money said it was about fifty degrees, but I’d check that last. My brain didn’t need any help on the “this stuff will give you hypothermia” front. I waded mid-stream, teeth chattering.

“You should be watching around you, Lily,” a deep voice rumbled. I clutched my chest and wheeled toward the sound. A black grizzly sat at the end of the snag, camouflaged by the tangle of branches, munching a trout as the water churned about his belly. He fixed me with moss-green eyes. “Dangerous, startling bears.”

“Jesus, Michail!” I said. My heart was stuck on ‘seizuring rabbit.’ “What are you doing here?”

His brow furrowed. “I was missing you,” he said, Russian accent deepening his rumble.

My chest squeezed. It’s been, what, three weeks? Four? Long enough I couldn’t remember. Guilt bowed my shoulders. I knew he couldn’t come by the visitor’s center — dodging the Registry had ended that years ago — so on my days off I was supposed to hike up Mount Tom Creek and meet him at our arch. I buried my face in my palm. “I’m sorry. It’s fieldtrip season…” The excuse tasted sour, yet I kept babbling. “They’re splitting my days off and I had to get readings before—”

Michail clicked his tongue. “Lyubov moya, no apologies for your research.” I heard the lip-curl in his voice. “You are more than carnival exhibit.”

I lifted my chin. “That’s Interpretive Ranger, thank you.” I was aiming for offended, but judging by the tilt of Michail’s head, I’d landed somewhere between ‘pouty’ and ‘pitiful.’ My lips tightened. Great. He dropped his trout and waded toward me. Double great. I averted my eyes and drove the flow meter’s stake into the riverbed. The last thing I needed right now was distraction and Michail was delightfully good at that.

“Lily.”

I attached a temperature probe to the post. “Bit busy, Michail.”

Small waves lapped my waist. His muzzle slid under my jaw in a cool caress. Eau de wet fur spiced the air. Most people would find the odor off-putting, but when you can turn into a bear — and have shared god remembers how many showers with one — it’s comforting. Homey, even. I inhaled despite myself.

“Zoloste.” His voice vibrated my bones. “I worry for you.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. This script was as familiar as my Smokey routine. He would start with “I escaped Motherland, fled Soviet persecution,” then move on to “Registry is seed of American tyranny,” and finish with another plea for me to join him as a nature-preserve-nudist. My chest lurched. Would it really be that bad? Wandering the mists, plucking fish straight from the rivers, dew settling on our fur in the mornings… I huffed and skipped to the end of our verbal dance.

“Running tells the normies harassment works. Makes it harder for the next shifter.” Checking my cables one last time, I slogged out of the river, shivering as wet clothes clung to my skin. Michail strode after me. “Besides.” I turned around and shrugged. “Playing Smokey earns brownie points, means Park Manager Dawson publishes my data.” Bitterness clung to my tongue. These days it was the only way I could get something in print.

Michail frowned. Well, as much as a grizzly can, anyway. “Appeasement only means you are on knees when knife comes out.”

My mouth went dry. I put my hand on my hip, as much to banish fear as to halt protest. “Did you come to argue with me or what?”

His jaw tightened. “…no.” Michail never liked backing down but after a few years and a couple of bear-brawls, he’d learned to let things drop. Still, it took a few seconds for his gaze to cool from ‘pissed’ to ‘smolder.’ He grinned. Paced closer. “There are better things to do.”

I laughed as he loomed over me. Lord, don’t let a hiker see us now. They’d think Michail was attacking and jump in to save me. “You’re terrible,” I said. “I have to take readings, remember?”

Hot breath brushed my neck. Water dripped on my skin in cool contrast. “As you Americans say, ‘all work and no play’…”

“You could help, medved,” I said and swatted his nose. “Make it go faster.”

He rolled his eyes playfully. “If I must.” A hearty shake sent water everywhere. I squeaked and threw my hands up.

Michail grimaced as the shift began. Soft pops of bone echoed over the river’s churn. Midnight fur gave way to rosy skin, exquisitely toned muscles steaming with shift-fever. His muzzle shortened and twisted back to the square jaw and high cheekbones I’d loved to trace in the mornings. Fading scratches and a thin new scar granted him a feral look.

I didn’t gape. Just… flushed more than I cared to admit.

Michail let out a whoosh of air and brushed back now-untamed hair. Warmth lurched through me. While I was stunned, he leaned in for a kiss. His tongue still carried the light, gamey tang of fish. Our lips parted, and he gently hooked my chin. “You were staring again, zoloste.” Hot-faced, I sputtered some excuse, but he just laughed and headed for my backpack.

While he rummaged through my gear, I touched my lips and rolled the taste of fish in my mouth. My eyes narrowed. Cutthroat trout? The sneak knew it was my favorite. He was tempting me, reminding me what civilization lacked. I crossed my arms. I wasn’t sure if I should beam or growl.

Michail produced my battered notebook. “I will record data for you, yes?” he said, leafing through the pages

I let my arms drop. It was too nice a night, the company too pretty, to stay stressed. “Yeah. Sure.”

He turned around and took up a wide-footed stance. A rakish grin left no doubt that the view was intentional. “So,” he said, twirling a pen. “Where is it you want it?”

* * *

Dawn brought crisp air and cold rain. Soaked and breathing hard, I jogged into the dingy locker room and threw my pack on the bench. Currently human, Kelsi peeked around her locker door. Minus raccoon-gray hair and mottled eyebrows, she reminded me of an Octoberfest ad: econo-sized bosoms, ample curves, and a smile that could heatstroke a penguin.

“Decided to camp out, huh?” she said.

I mumbled an affirmative and spun my lock.

“Hold still.” Kelsi plucked a leaf from my hair. “You brought a souvenir.”

Heat crept up my neck. Traces of Michail’s bear musk clung to my skin. Add in twiggy locks and any shifter with a decent nose would know exactly what I’d been up to. Still, Kelsi didn’t cock an eyebrow or anything. Either she had the best poker face ever — unlikely, given her delighted squeals during Uno — or she had the nose of a normie.

Acting as if nothing was amiss, I opened my dented locker. “Just getting some early readings.”

“You should have taken longer,” she said and pulled up her sweater. Fabric muffled her voice. “Missed the first bus.”

“The job’s not that bad,” I said. Water dripped from my nose. A quick puff blew it away. “Free park admission, free uniform…” I pulled out my oversized pair of trousers. “Well, part of one, anyway.”

“It’d be better if the kids gave a crap,” Kelsi said and traded pants for short-shorts. Ranger Rick was always drawn commando, but she’d talked Dawson into letting her keep some semblance of dignity. “If I were you, I’d take a gig at the zoo.”

I paused. “…what?”

“Yeah, Woodland Zoo? They pay shifters to hang out in the enclosures.” She plopped her Stetson on her head. “If I wasn’t a hybrid-form, I’d do it. Put some glass between me and the little monsters.”

I nodded to the clock over the door. “The ones here in seven minutes?”

Kelsi’s eyes widened. “Crap!” She threw on her vest and the scent of raccoon filled the air. A pained gasp escaped as her tailbone popped and stretched to four feet of plume. Fur in place, she dashed into the darkened visitor’s center, shouting “I have to get the coloring books ready!”

I wasn’t expected to lay out activities for the kids, bears lacking thumbs and all, but I still hastily peeled off my clothes. When the kids arrived I needed to be in place with my back to a wall. Walking through the visitor center only turned the horde into piggy-back-hungry velociraptors. I waded into my pants and summoned the change.

An inferno swept through my blood, turning it to a furnace. Pain sledgehammered me into an ursine shape. Once the heat and shakiness faded, I lumbered for the door, claws clicking on the tile. A draft made me stop. Uh oh. I peered down. Sure enough, I’d forgotten to close my fly. I lolled my head back. Having thumbs would save my dignity but a wardrobe adjustment wasn’t worth shifting to human and back.

“Kelsi?” I called. Turns out swallowing pride makes your ears droop. “I need a zip.”

The next few hours continued to slide into what we called ‘retirement impetus:’ no eager learners, Q&A mostly focused on if we pooped in the woods, somebody turned our six point buck into a five-and-a-half, and a rug-rat spilled apple juice on me.

During a lull I went to the bathroom, pawed the water on, and wasted a tree’s worth of paper towels trying to get clean. All I really accomplished was soaking the front of my trousers. I grumbled and swatted the faucet shut. No kids, Smokey just gets super excited putting out fires!

Padding back into the visitor’s center, a wave of newsprint-scented air hit me. Gun-oil and fear came with it.

Ice whispered up my spine. Appeasement only means you are on knees when knife comes out. Pushing back Michail’s warning, I snuffled the air, certain there was a less-paranoid explanation. Dawson’s cologne teased my nose. I loped toward the scent, taxidermy animals staring after me with dead eyes.

Three Law Enforcement Rangers waited in the lobby. The trio projected that ‘everything’s under control’ vibe, but the tightness of their jaws told a different story. Dawson, back military straight, talked with Kelsi in a low and furtive tone. Her eyes were wide and her tail tucked.

I cleared my throat. “Everything okay?”

They turned. Worry darkened Kelsi’s gaze. Dawson’s was a flat, cold gray.

“There’s been an attack,” she squeaked.

“Hikers, near Mount Tom Creek,” Dawson said. His grip tightened on a Ziploc full of rags. Even sealed, I whiffed blood and grizzly. My throat constricted. Michail.

“Casualties?” I asked.

“One dead, two injured.”

My pulse thudded in my ears. He had to have a reason. “What happened?”

Dawson shook his head. “Group stepped off the trail, black bear charged them—”

“Grizzly,” one of the guards interrupted. “Said it was nine feet when it reared.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. My insides were a leaden mass. “There’re no grizzlies in the Olympics.”

“And Lily was here all morning,” Kelsi said quickly.

Dawson sniffed. “Misjudged size in the confusion. Standard fear response.” He took off his Stetson and rubbed his buzz cut. “Still. Bear that’ll attack people. . .” His unspoken intent roared in my ears. It needs to be put down. Nausea washed over me. Dawson kept talking. “When the next class comes, escort them on and off the bus and keep them in the visitor’s center.”

“What’s your plan?” I asked, voice shaking. Hopefully they would misread my concern and think I was fretting over the visitors.

“For now we’re closing the trail and escorting hikers to safer areas.” He waggled the bag of rags. “In the meantime, we’ve asked local hunters to bring their dogs.”

Bile filled my throat. Dogs. My legs ached, screamed with the need to run and find Michail before the law did. They’re bringing dogs. If I could just talk to him, let him explain, we might be able to convince Dawson that the attack had been provoked, an act of self-preservation. But if the dogs found him first—

“Lily.” Dawson put a hand on my shoulder. I jerked. “Until we bag this thing, no more readings, okay?” he said, trying to give me a little shake. Didn’t work. I was over eight hundred pounds. “We can’t lose Smokey.”

I nodded. Inside I was growling. “Yeah. Sure.”

* * *

Branches whipped my face as I ran. Rain pounded my Gore-Tex and roared in my ears. My pulse was louder. He has to be there. I kept running, lungs burning as I dodged roots and night-shrouded trees. Being a shifter let me see in the dark, but with hunters on the way I had to stay human, dulling my senses. Still, my nose was sharp enough so I could smell Michail.

His trail, sweet, musky, and male, twined along Mount Tom Creek, quickly eroding in the rain. A coppery tang knotted my gut. Blood. Shifters were spectacular healers, able to close most wounds in a few days, but we could still bleed to death. And in this storm there was no telling how much Michail had lost. I scrambled upstream, fear lancing my heart.

He has to be there.

A pair of familiar hemlocks loomed in the night. I let out a sobbing, foggy breath. The ancient trees straddled the water, undercut by the river ages ago, but instead of toppling into the currents they’d fallen against each other, their combined strength resisting the elements until time had fused them together. Branches reached as one for the sky while conjoined roots formed a slight shelter. I spied Michail inside the ancient tangle, hunkered over in human form.

“Michail!” I called, staggering closer.

His head snapped up. Pain rasped his voice. “Lily?”

I ducked under the roots, frigid water pouring into my shoes. Blood-tang filled my nose. Michail sat on a tangle of driftwood clutching a denuded, gore-coated stick. An unusual pallor haunted his skin.

His brow wrinkled. “Lyubov moya, why—

“I smelled you on those hiker’s clothes,” I said. My throat constricted. There were… holes in him. On his side. His back. In the dark they wept black.

“Poachers, zoloste,” he hissed and dug the stick into a hip wound. I yelped and darted for the branch. A flash of metal stopped me. Michail held up the deformed slug, fingers stained. “Thought I was a prize black-bear.” He flicked the bullet into the gurgling stream. “Mudak.

I swallowed bile. Self-defense. They’d tried to shoot him, and he’d fought back. I threw my arms around him, shaking. It was self-defense. “We have to get you to the Ranger’s Station.” From there we could summon a doctor, call the police—

“No.”

The word hit like a punch. I pulled back. “What?”

“I go back, my name is in Registry as bear.”

Temper warmed my blood. I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Damn it, Michail! You’re not running from Stalin anymore!”

“Chernenko,” Michail corrected. He shrugged. Winced. “And doesn’t matter. Judge says innocent, someone always says guilty. They find me by Registry and…” He put his fingers to his head and mimed a gunshot.

My jaw dropped. “People aren’t like that!”

Michail’s eyes narrowed. “Zoloste.  My father died for raising me Orthodox.” His words were sharp as a blade. “Because friends told Special Committee.” He set aside his stick and twined his bloodied fingers in mine. “Poachers will demand bear. Vengeance.” He squeezed. “You must come, run to Mount Tom.”

I pulled loose and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Michail, I can’t—” He lolled his head back and started to rumble. It died with a wince. My retort withered on my tongue. I touched his arm and waited while he expelled the pain in short, foggy bursts.

“What’s wrong?” I asked once he’d regained composure. Stupid question, really, but my brain was still rebooting.

“Shoulder,” he said, resting against a gargantuan root. It was the same one he’d carved our initials into years ago. “Cannot reach.”

My lips tightened. “Turn around.”

Moving gingerly, Michail presented his well-muscled shoulder. I pushed back my hood and leaned in close, fighting nausea as I gently manipulated savaged flesh. At least he’s human now. Translational injury would leave the bullet a centimeter or two below the skin, rather than inches deep in a bear’s beefy shoulder.

“They will never respect you, Zoloste.

Dawson’s voice rang in my ears. We can’t lose Smokey. “I know,” I murmured. “But that’s not why I stay.”

Metal glistened in the wound. I fished the hunk out with the stick, Michail’s fists clenched the whole time, and flicked the bullet aside. I slid off the root, bark catching my jeans, and scrubbed my hands in the frigid stream. Michail just watched with sad, tired eyes.

“Then why?” he asked.

As I sat in the dark with blood on my clothes, the answer seemed… weak. And so very faraway. I took a deep breath. “Not everyone can run. Some of those kids—”

A howl drifted through the woods. My breath caught. Dogs. I whipped around. Michail was no fool. He’d already gotten to his feet, scanning the trees with narrowed eyes. “One, maybe one-and-half kilometers,” he said.

My chest squeezed. Not his first man hunt. I touched his cheek. Stubble pricked my fingers. “Dawson brought hunters.” My voice shook. “Go. The rain…” Stones filled my throat, but I choked them down. “The rain’ll wash out your trail.”

He grabbed my arm, nails lengthening into points. “No.” He nodded to my stained Gore-Tex. “Blood all over you. Dogs will come to you.”

“I know.” I flashed a smile I didn’t feel. “But they’re hunting a bear, right? Not like they’ll shoot a human.” Please, please God let that be true.

Michail’s grip constricted, his nails puncturing my jacket. Fear and anger warred in his eyes. I held my breath. Another howl rang in the distance. He grimaced and squeezed his eyes shut. His fingers fell from my arm. “Chert voz’mi,” he whispered. He leaned in and kissed me deeply. This time I tasted only him. “Spring, if hunt is over…”

I rested my forehead against his. Pain raked my heart. “…I’ll meet you here.”

He breathed into my hair. Kissed the top of my head. Fur sprouted from his skin, and he stepped into the river, using the water to hide his trail. I caught a whiff of fresh grizzly and then he was gone, swallowed up by rain and night.

Tears burned down my cheeks. “Run fast, medved.” I sniffed and wiped an arm across my face. It just smeared mud and bark everywhere.

Shivering, I waited and listened to the dogs. Their tone grew excited. Frenetic. Let them get right on top of you. I’d get only one chance, and the rain would strip Michail’s scent fast. I shucked my coat and picked up the gore-coated stick. Then I’d better leave a big damn trail.

Downstream, a flashlight winked between the trees. My pulse quickened. They’re here.

I leapt from the shelter, dragging my blood-stained coat behind me. Rain hit like cold, hard bullets. I ran into the wind and up a ridge, jumped over roots and crashed through every fern and huckleberry, lashing the foliage with Michail’s surgery-stick. By God, if those dogs couldn’t follow this mess they were useless.

Bays soon turned to keening barks. Branches snapped as the hounds gained behind me. My heart lurched. Not yet! I veered down a steep slope. Adrenaline surged through my body and spurred me on like some sort of daredevil mountain goat. I gasped for air. Wet dog hit my nose.

A huge mutt angled into my path, teeth flashing. I yelped and changed course. In my panic I smacked into a tree. I went ass-over-tea-kettle, bouncing off rocks and plowing down saplings, until my leg caught a boulder. Something crunched and pain exploded across my senses.

I screamed. Or vomited. Not sure which, but something definitely came out.

Agony throbbed through me, kept me on the ground until the hounds came. Hot breath and warm noses snuffled over me. One mutt kept barking in my ear. I just kept my eyes shut and gritted my teeth against the pain until somebody shined a flashlight in my face.

“Holy shit,” Dawson said. I groaned and blocked the glare, squinting between my fingers. His jaw hung slack. “Lily?”

* * *

While Kelsi juggled and sang to the kids about recycling, I sat in my own personal hell, claws twitching as I endured the twelfth day of Itch-toberfest. Dawson wasn’t able to replace Smokey and I needed to eat, so I’d agreed to heal up as a grizzly and had the cast applied in bear-form. I stifled a whimper. Stupid move, really. Fur took the itching from ‘torture’ to ‘Circle of Hell,’ and my painkillers weren’t doing squat. My ears flattened. The only plus to it all was that Dawson and the hunters had dragged me back to the visitor’s center, cancelling the hunt until an ambulance showed.

I glanced out the visitor’s center window, slumping like a fern in the rain. Hope you’re in better shape, Michail. It’d be another five months before I knew. A Law Enforcement Ranger, reeking of cheap cologne and gun-oil, loitered by the stuffed deer, examining Kelsi’s glue-job. I sighed and held up a recycling bin, doing my best to ignore him. And that’s if I can ditch my escort.

When Dawson had asked how I’d wound up in the woods covered in blood, I’d made something up about not having readings during heavy rainfall, slipping out, and running into the ‘Big Bad Bear.’ She’d been a mother with cubs, bloodied by her earlier run-in with the ‘hikers,’ so she’d attacked and chased me until I’d crashed down the hill and broke my leg. I stifled a huff. Dawson smells a rat, though. Officially Ranger Cheap-Cologne or one of his buddies were here so I didn’t sneak off and get hurt again, but a twenty-four-hour-shadow was less ‘caring’ and more ‘surveillance.’ Doubly so when you added in cold glances and high-caliber side arms. The whole affair had left me with whiplash; I’d been looking over my shoulder constantly and Michail’s warnings haunted me like perpetual swansong.

Kelsi pitched her cans into my bin one by one, punctuating her act. A few kids clapped. The rest popped up despite the protest of the teacher and swarmed me to croon get-betters and sign my cast with crayons.

“Aw, thank you, kids.” I wriggled in my seat, trying to relieve my aching rump. Turns out bear-butts aren’t designed to sit on wood crates all day. Who knew?

A girl with orange and black hair shouldered through the crowd. A faint scent of tiger wafted from her, spicy and sharp. Her yellow eyes were bright. “Miss Smokey,” she said.

The weight on my shoulders lifted. Finally.

“Smokey’s a boy, Whiskers,” one of the kids snapped.

Tiger-girl put her hands on her hips and shot them a withering glare. “Smokey’s a boar. She’s clearly a sow.”

“That’s right,” I said, surprise creeping into my voice. She knows her animal terms. I smiled and cocked my head. “Did you have a question?”

She nodded. “Well, you said fires were bad, but—”

A blonde boy, tall for his age, stopped signing my cast. His face pinched as he studied me. “You’re a shifter?” Disgust marinated every syllable. He flicked his head toward tiger-girl. “Like her?”

My muzzle wrinkled. How do you think I’m talking, kiddo? “Yeah . . . And?”

Kelsi shook a bag of candy and shouted over the buzz. “Who can name a native fish?” Chocolate proved more exciting than talking bears. The locusts moved to Kelsi, squealing ‘pink-eye salmon’ and other imaginary species. Only tiger-girl remained, glowering down at her sandals and clenching her coloring book, knuckles white.

My chest squeezed. God, how many times had I been in the same position? At her age I’d wanted to run away, hide from it all like Michail. Stones filled my gut. Of course she doesn’t have that choice. Tigers weren’t exactly local wildlife. “What’s your name?” I asked.

She sniffed and glanced at me. “…Antimony.”

“So, Antimony, what was this about fires?”

Dark clouds faded from her vision, letting some sparkle back in. “Well, Douglas-firs and fireweed need fire for their babies to grow…” That was an oversimplification, but she was in what, fourth grade? I nodded. Her posture slowly straightened. “And different animals need them for food and homes, right?”

“Correct.”

Antimony’s brow furrowed. “So fires are good.” She frowned and chewed her lip. “Well, sometimes.”

“That’s true,” I said, voice upbeat. “In fact, that’s part of my research.”

Her mouth formed a tiny little ‘O.’ “Shifters can do that?”

Hearing her disbelief, the raw strength of it, made my throat constrict. “Of course!” I leaned in conspiratorially and braced my paws on my knees. Bad move, really. Fresh pain shot through my leg. I grimaced. Antimony’s eyebrows rose, but thankfully she didn’t change the topic. I let out a slow breath and transferred all my weight to the other knee. “Some people told me that I can’t do research, or that because I’m a shifter it won’t go anywhere, but you know what?”

Antimony leaned closer, voice dropping to a whisper. “What?”

“I do it anyway.”

Her lips twitched with the start of a smile. She jabbed a thumb toward the rest of her class. “So when they say I can’t be a scientist ’cause I’m a shifter…?”

I plopped the Stetson on her head. It seemed the right thing to do. Kids were obsessed with that hat. “You can be anything, Antimony, fur or not.”

She grinned so big I caught a glimpse of fangs. Pain, sweet and sharp, filled my heart and washed away the days until spring. I smiled too. This, Michail… this is why I stay.

 

* * *

Originally published in Writers of the Future

About the Author

Diana A. Hart lives in Washington State, speaks fluent dog, and escapes whenever somebody leaves the gate open—if lost, she can be found rolling dice at her friendly local game store. Her passion for storytelling stems from a well-used library card and years immersed in the oral traditions of the Navajo. She was previously published in Writers of the Future, Vol. 34.

Follow her on Twitter: @ DianaAHart

Categories: Stories

A List of Historical Places Frequented by a Boy and His Dog

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:06

by Eleanor R. Wood

“You’re not here, but it smells of you, somewhere under the stone where I can’t follow.”

1.) The tree fort your friend built, that you so longed to play in, but instead only visited once. When you realized I couldn’t climb up and play too, you never went back. I marked it for us anyway.

2.) The shallow creek, where we splashed and cooled off in summer. Your smooth feet would slip on the rocks. When you fell and cut your chin that time, I licked it better.

3.) The wide open space of the park, where you’d throw the frisbee over and over and I’d bring it back to you again and again until we both fell, laughing and panting, to the damp grass.

4.) The school gate, where I was never allowed to follow, but had only to wait, senses quivering, until the surge of exiting humans narrowed to the blessed single point of the only one who mattered to me. Your delightful ruffling of my ears… the taste of your cheek, mingled with all the scents of the day.

5.) The woods, with their squirrel trails and muddy puddles so good to drink from. You always pulled me away, but if only you’d just tried a sip, once, you’d have known the rich flavors of the forest as I did.

6.) Your bunk bed, low enough for me to leap up with a scrabble of back feet so I could snuggle up with you and rest. I don’t remember when the resting stopped being only at night, but I still loved to curl up to you even when the sun blazed bright outside and the Mother tsked at me when she came in and out with strong-smelling drinks.

7.) The house, where we were supposed to only be together, until the time you stopped being there with me and so did everyone else and it was quiet and your scent was faint and my heart thumped with loneliness.

8.) The cold corridors that smelled strongly of the stuff that only came out if I had an accident indoors, where the Mother held my lead tightly and strangers smiled or frowned at me and then suddenly you were there, in a bed I’d never seen, and I leapt up and you threw your oddly weak arms around me and my whole body wriggled with how much I’d missed you.

9.) The house, again, alone.

10.) The place where grass grows and dying flowers lie, shorn from life, against smooth stone slabs in rows and rows. You’re not here, but it smells of you, somewhere under the stone where I can’t follow. The Mother cries when we come here. I cry too, because I don’t know how to find you.

11.) The fort, the creek, the park, the gate, the woods, the bed, the house. I go to them, because they are ours. I go to them because maybe, one day, you will be there again.

 

* * *

About the Author

Eleanor R. Wood’s stories have appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, Diabolical PlotsPodCastleNature: FuturesThe Best of British Fantasy 2019, and various anthologies, among other places. She writes and eats licorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, two marvelous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee.

She blogs at creativepanoply.wordpress.com and tweets @erwrites.

Categories: Stories

Him Without Her and Her Within Him

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:05

by Aimee Ogden

“Before he learned to shift, he also would have said he could never love a bird. But here he is, and so is she.”

Lincoln is in the kitchen smearing peanut butter onto the last few crackers in the box, the ones that are chipped and cracked but still salvageable. He clicks the knife hard against the edges of the peanut butter jar, crinkles the cracker sleeves too, but he can still hear his mom crying upstairs, and Aunt Jen’s voice raised in counterpoint. He slams the cupboard door and for a moment there’s just the crash of wood on wood in his ears and not the noise from above.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair that he has to pretend nothing’s wrong while one big long parade of wrongness marches up and down the stairs and through the hallways of his house twelve times a day. Mom came home to die and everyone wants Lincoln to act like she might just come waltzing down into the kitchen tomorrow morning to make everyone pancakes and complain about Congress.

There’s a thunder of footsteps on the staircase, but when he glances up hopefully, it’s just Aunt Jen, her arms full of wadded-up sheets. An acrid ammonia odor cuts through the background radiation of antiseptics. Lincoln breathes through his mouth as he puts away the peanut butter and tears up the cracker box for the recycling. Aunt Jen doesn’t greet him as she storms through the kitchen, but after she opens the basement door with one foot she pauses. “Sweetheart, get out the Lysol spray and the paper towels, will you?”

“I can clean the mattress liner.” He crushes the end of the plastic cracker sleeve in his palm, smashing the last few bits to dust. “I don’t mind.”

“I’ll do it. I’m just going to throw in a load of— Lincoln! What did you do?” The laundry cascades to the floor in dreamy, fluttering parachutes. Aunt Jen lunges to the counter to pull an envelope out from underneath the dirty knife. Her shirt hem collects a greasy wad of peanut butter, and leaves a brownish streak behind on the paper. Lincoln can still make out the words For your eighteenth birthday scrawled in shaky blue ink. “Jesus, Lincoln, can you not pay an ounce of attention to what you’re doing?”

As if he can do anything but pay attention to what’s going on. He knocks the plate of crackers into the sink and the plate strikes the stainless steel with a resounding chime that echoes on and on as it rolls on its rim and the sound drives him up the stairs, two at a time. He locks the door behind him and sits down hard with his back against it.

Muffled curses precede Aunt Jen up the stairs. She bangs on his door once, twice, three times. She shouts at him to come out and apologize and clean up his mess. He waits. Sure enough, after one more round of knocking, Aunt Jen swears again and storms away. When he puts his ear to the door, he can hear her apologizing to his mom for making her wait.

“It’s okay.” From his room, he can hear his mom’s soft words. She’s not crying anymore but the pain is curled up inside her voice, trying to burrow its way out. It would be better if she just set it free. “It’s okay, Jenny, I’m fine.”

Once, Lincoln’s mom washed his mouth out with soap. He can’t remember exactly what he’d said — some jagged-edged word he’d picked up at school and turned against one of the other kids, maybe? Afterward they both cried and she promised never to do it again. There’s not enough soap in this eternally scrubbed-clean, wiped-down house to wash away a lie like I’m fine. Lincoln pushes off the ground and flings open his bedroom window and shifts into the crow-shape as he launches himself outside.

In the crow-shape, Lincoln is still Lincoln, both more so and less: the pared-down outline of himself, only the essentials left. The Cliffs Notes version of his own brain. He sweeps the air with his wings, beating the ground farther and farther away, until the world is nothing but endless violet-stained sky.

When he’s in his human-shape, Lincoln thrashes to exhaustion against the cage of rules that constrain his shifting. When he’s purely human, it feels as if there should be a way to wrench the magic sideways, to break it or bend it into some new form. A way to heal, to cure, to bring to life. But when he’s the crow, things are what they are. A boy who is also a crow can’t steal the sickness from his mother’s body like a shiny trinket, and he can’t peck away tumors like glistening white grubs hidden within her flesh. He can only glide high above her pain, and his — and only for a little while at that.

Awk awk-awk. The familiar vocalization brings his head around to search for the crow it came from, and his body quickly follows. When his wings tip, he catches shear, and drops rapidly. He recovers, with a few vigorous flaps, and falls into Dove’s slipstream. She caws again, and he rasps out a response in kind.

Dove is the name he gave her — crows don’t have names of their own. A childish idea of a joke, at first. Before he knew how closely they would pull into one another’s orbit. But it fits, somehow. There’s a peacefulness to her. A promise that there can be an end to the war raging inside his skin. Together they glide through the afternoon, their shadows sliding one over the other.

They drop from the sky onto the sidewalk on Walnut Street, where a squirrel’s twisted corpse slowly cools with the fading sunlight. Dove hops close first, slices into its belly with her beak, and tears free a hunk of flesh. She tips her head back to swallow, then turns it to the side to fix him with one beady eye. He struts closer and joins her to gorge on the still-fresh meat.

Before he learned to shift, Lincoln-the-human would have turned up his nose at the warm delicate liver of a fresh kill. Before he learned to shift, he also would have said he could never love a bird. But here he is, and so is she.

With gore still streaked on his beak, he wants to fluff out his feathers, show her the gleaming black of his fine good health and the broad powerful expanse of his flight muscles. He wants to sing her a song to quicken the already flutter-fast rhythm of her heart, to stroke his beak through the wonderful dark mystery of her feathers and have her stroke his in turn. He doesn’t love her in the same way that he loves his mom or dad or Aunt Jen, or even the same way that he loved his eighth-grade boyfriend. This is something unique and different, and terrible for its fragility. If — when — Mom dies, the family might move. And even if they don’t — what if Dove builds her nest in Mrs. Riviera’s yard and she knocks it down with her cane, or what if a hawk snatches the fledglings on their first flight? The dismal possibilities stack up and Lincoln is small and powerless in their shadow.

Dove looks up from the picked-over squirrel and caws again. The sound sends Lincoln up and into the air, homeward bound.

* * *

No one hears him crash onto the roof and in through the window. Or if they do, they chalk it up to a typical teenage mood, slammed door or banging drawers. Lincoln doesn’t know what typical teenage anything feels like anymore and he’s tired of Dad and Aunt Jen trying to shove all his problems into his age, like a one-size-fits-all t-shirt that he can only squeeze one arm inside.

He stands in the middle of the room, trying to remember what he was doing before he was a bird: both now, and in a broad existential sense. A snarl from his stomach interrupts his ruminations. The crackers he abandoned earlier are probably still lying in the sink. He slouches down the stairs in search of those, or something better.

Dad’s at the kitchen table, hunched over a plate streaked with pasty lines of cooled cheese sauce. He looks up at Lincoln’s arrival, and the wrinkle between his eyebrows deepens. “Done sulking in your room? We’re happy to let you have your privacy, Link, but you make it hard to remember that when you act half your age.”

Lincoln isn’t the one who named his kid Lincoln so that he could call him by a nickname from a favorite video game; comments from Dad about immaturity don’t carry a lot of weight. He ignores Dad and lopes to the stove, where a large pile of noodles still wallow in sticky sauce. No need for a plate; he’ll finish what’s there. He takes the pot and the serving spoon to the table and drops to a seat at the opposite end from Dad. “No, thanks,” says Dad dryly, “I don’t need any seconds.”

A machine gun rat-a-tat of footsteps shooting down the stairs. Aunt Jen lopes into the kitchen. “Oh good, you’re both actually eating something with protein in it.” She puts her hands on the counter and stretches her shoulders and back through a series of quasi-yoga poses. “Lincoln, did you do your laundry yet? If you don’t have clean socks for school tomorrow I don’t want to hear about it at seven in the morning.”

“Yeah.” He stuffs his mouth with the serving spoon to make an excuse for not saying anything more.

Dad has his phone on the table, scrolling through apps with his thumb. “Finally supposed to freeze tonight,” he says cheerfully. As if talking about normal bullshit like the weather is a normal thing for this family to do right now. “Might kill off those damn mosquitoes.”

“Oh, no,” says Aunt Jen, and leans back against the wall. “I’m not ready for snow and all that yet.”

Lincoln pushes back from the table, one arm wrapped around the cold stockpot. “Can I eat dinner in my room?”

“No,” say Dad and Aunt Jen at the same time. Lincoln slumps in his chair and chews cold macaroni till his jaws hurt. He eats with his mouth open, so that his tongue smacks thickly and the macaroni glops between his teeth. By the end he’s made himself nauseous, but neither Aunt Jen nor Dad correct his manners, and he can’t hear them blabbing on about the weather and the neighbors and whether the stupid Packers are going to win this weekend.

* * *

After dinner he stands outside his parents’ bedroom door. His mother’s bedroom door, that is; Dad’s sheets are thrown out on the living room sofa. “I could read to you,” he says. He keeps his voice low, so that if she’s asleep she’ll stay that way, so that if she’s hurting too much to hide it she can pretend she’s not awake to hear him. He leans into the door as he speaks, and the cheap composite wood shifts against his weight. “One of your weird Mom books. Or A Separate Peace. We have to read that for English 9.” He waits for an answer. “A Separate Peace is bullshit anyway,” he says, lips against the white-painted grain. No one corrects his language or his literary opinions, and after a moment of floorboard-creaking silence he retreats to his room.

* * *

Lincoln lies in bed with the box fan in the corner cranked up to its maximum speed. His bedroom gets cold in the fall and winter, but he can’t sleep without the roar of the fan competing with the wind’s dull whine. Tonight, actually, he can’t sleep either way. He wrestles with the covers, pulling them on and kicking them off, until they’re a hopeless tangle. He shoves them off the edge of the bed with one foot and they land with a soft whuff on the floor. Now he’s too cold and too tired to get out of bed to tuck the sheets and comforter back in.

The branches of the oak tree scratch at the glass, inviting him to shift out into the night. The moon’s cold pale light crawls up his bare legs and leaves them itching. He wants to do the right thing. But he doesn’t know how to know what the right thing is, nor who, exactly, it would be right for.

When he was little, he thought that knowing the right thing to do was something you learned when you got older, part of the process of Becoming a Grown-up. Now he knows that grown-ups don’t know anything about what’s right and what’s not.

He doesn’t know, but he suspects, that sometimes there’s no right thing at all — only a thing that hurts the least.

* * *

Before the first Friday sunlight spills into his room, Lincoln is awake, perched on the footboard of his bed — still human, merely anxious. Already dressed for the day, he makes his hoodie zipper sing shrilly as he yanks it up, down, up again. As he huddles there, waiting for a decision to land on his shoulders, the first sounds of morning creep down the hallway: muffled footsteps, the flush of the toilet. Words, too quiet for him to understand. The pipes in the walls creak and grumble and Lincoln is in the bedroom window before his head realizes that his body has already long since decided.

His arms fold into wings and the weight of him falls away. He pumps against the air, pushing higher and farther away, and casts his raucous call for her. The shape of her caw is carved on the banner of his breastbone, and he hopes the same is true for her.

But when he flies over the town, casting his shadow across the sloping roofs, she does not lift into the air to meet him. The cold air burns his lungs and his croaks grow hoarse. It’s mating season and there is no such thing as an engagement ring between crows. He’s never offered her a proper courtship display. She might even think him another female, a companion but not a mate. Perhaps she’s already taken a partner.

Crows bond for life, but no one ever promised the life would be his.

Disappointment fills the hollows of his bones, makes him heavy. He swings groundward, toward a knot of other crows hopping about in the Piggly-Wiggly parking lot. There’s a moment in between his dropping into their orbit and his realization of what gravitational mass has pulled them close. A moment when understanding tries to hide its head beneath its wing.

The flies are not confused. They congregate at their feast and their brisk vibrations are a hymn of gratitude. This twisted wreck of spilled guts and loose feathers is their daily bread. One crawls across the glassy black pearl that was once an eye. Lincoln waits for a blink that will never come. He looks at his warped reflection so that he doesn’t have to read Dove’s name into the twisted lines of ribs and the frozen curl of claws.

“Kraaa,” says another crow, hopping closer to the corpse and then back again. The caw might mean mine-mine-mine or car or man-child, but in context the most likely meaning was cat. Lincoln flaps his wings hard, but doesn’t leave the ground; several other crows scutter away from him. Context: Dove’s splintered bones and dull fly-picked viscera.

Flies. The flies have to leave her alone. She’s dead but that doesn’t mean they all have to pretend it’s all right, that the shape that held her is nothing now. He hops to her and pecks viciously at the one on her eye. It takes wing with a shrill whine and instead of chitin he gets a gelid burst of salt-sweet liquid.

Of Dove.

Only his flapping wings save him from tumbling over backwards. He beats them harder, blocking out the sun that dares to shine on these bloody bones. A sky that would let her tumble from its grace doesn’t deserve her. Cat, he cries bitterly, or perhaps it is mine-mine-mine! that he shrieks. He covers her with his body and here next to her, on top of her, he is saturated in the sweet-rotten smell of her. He preens a stray feather from her neck and sets it free. Then he puts his beak to the torn strip of flesh at her throat and rips it free. When he cants his head back it tumbles down his throat, carrion-love, fetid and nourishing.

Mine.

More.

The sweet web of her pancreas, the tang of her liver. He is collecting the bits of her and even as his beak works on this purest and most frightening instinct, his body moves too, his cloaca shoving dryly against the hollow ruins. Everything is wrong but everything is right too, as right as it can be, him without her and her within him. His cry rakes his throat raw.

“Awk awk-awk.”

He shatters the air with a beat of his wings and staggers back. Dove stands on the other side of the corpse from him, and cants her head. “Awk,” she repeats, curious, concerned.

Alive.

His gorge rises, sorrow refusing to be washed away by nauseous relief. He staggers away, dragging his wings as if they are broken, as the other crows scuttle back and forth and croak their confusion. Dove follows, hopping after him. She stops with an alarmed cry when he shifts. He’s a boy again by the time he clears the parking lot and though he has no too-heavy wings to bear up against, he runs all the way home as if they are still there trailing behind him.

* * *

He climbs the downspout to get back up to his room. The gutter shrills its alarm when he puts his weight on it, but it holds long enough for him to drag himself in through the open window. No one comes to ask about the noise, and Lincoln doesn’t make it any farther than the floor below the sill. He puts his arms over his head and wets the carpet with confused tears.

A knock wakes him from a shallow, huddled sleep. His neck hurts, his left arm tingles numbly. “Honey,” says Aunt Jen through the door. “Your dad’s at work and I have to get to the grocery store before the lady from hospice comes this evening. I hate to ask it of you, but since you’re home from school already…” Her words fall away. She doesn’t know how to ask even this smallest and most precious thing of him.

She doesn’t say anything else, just stands there; he can see the shadow of her feet beneath the door. He rises on hollow-boned legs and crosses the room and when he opens the door she stumbles as if she were leaning against it. “Lincoln,” she says, and worry hides itself in the folds of a familiar frown. “How late were you up last night?”

He looks aside and his dresser mirror deals him a glancing blow: the skin around his eyes as red as open sores, whites spiderwebbed with pink. When he shrugs, his skin shifts paper-thin across his bones. He could tear it away and leave Aunt Jen with nothing but a handful of black feathers. If he clings to the crow-shape for good, there will be grief. However hard he beats his wings, he can’t fly away from that, but crows at least know how to say goodbye. They know that it needs to be said.

The hairs on his neck prickle, as if they would rather be feathers. He leans into that electric possibility, the safety of knowing that he could be elsewhere. That he could be Dove’s. If he needed to be. If he wanted. His hand finds the doorjamb and the hollow-core wood whispers promises of home. “I can keep an eye on things. It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

She smiles without really letting go of the frown. “Okay. If you’re sure it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s fine.”

“Okay,” she says again, and once more before she turns. “Okay. Thanks, sweetheart.” Her body turns toward the stairs and her head follows last, so that her gaze clings to him a little longer. Then it breaks free and she hurries down the stairs, her frayed ponytail bouncing shoulder to shoulder.

Lincoln waits for the dull chatter of the keyring, the slam of the door, the distant thunder of the Hyundai’s engine. Only then does he pad downstairs.

The workaday noises of the kitchen — the fridge’s frustrated dust-clogged fan, the dishwasher’s sloshing — swallow up the sound of his bare feet on the linoleum. He’s a ghost in this space, but not his own ghost. Someone else’s.

The box is in its customary place, shoved up on top of the microwave, out of sight but never out of mind. When he takes it down, the peanut-butter-stained letter lies on top of the pile. He sits at the table and takes that one out first. The envelope is heavy, and not only with words; its paper is thick, the color of milk with a little bit of coffee, the way Lincoln drinks it. His finger slides into the tiny open space at the corner of the flap and he pulls until he hears the seal start to rip. Then he freezes. There’s a sharp-edged comfort in resting here on the moment’s cusp, a cage of hollow bones around him that knows his shape and that he could shatter with a shrug. He could be a boy or a bird. He could fly high over his grief and let his shadow skim over it lightly, or he could let it hatch and learn to love what emerged naked and raw from the remains.

He jerks his wrist, and tears the envelope.

The paper whispers as he draws it out and flattens it on the tabletop. I wish I could know you as an adult. But that man, whoever he is, casts a long shadow backward and I can see you in its outline — He takes out another envelope and rips into it, all hesitation sublimated by the pressure here. When you meet that person, whoever they are, and you just know — Another envelope. The kind of father you’ll be — Another. When your dad takes you out for your first legal drink, don’t let him drag you to Priestley’s, that’s an old people bar! Tell him I said he has to

All around Lincoln lies a flock of torn white wings. One last letter waits in the bottom of the box. This one is stark white, a plain cheap letter-sized affair, flimsy and light under his touch. It’s not even sealed and there’s a word on the front he hasn’t seen before: If.

If I have to leave you early

He unfolds a piece of lined notebook paper. Its left margin is uneven where the shredded remnants of spiral binding have been cut away. He moves his fingers over the paper as he reads and the deep imprints left by the pen guide him as he goes.

My dear Link,

It’s Thursday, the fourth of June, and we just got back from the doctor. I think you already know something’s wrong, but I have to find the words to tell you that the news wasn’t what we were expecting. And it wasn’t good. So maybe if I can figure it out here, first, I can find a way to say it out loud. Maybe that will make it real. I’m not ready for it to be real yet. I’m not ready to imagine not watching you grow up, find your way in the world, make a space for yourself in it.

He tears the letter in half, tears it again, crushes the pieces down into points and shoves them into his mouth. He chews, the paper communion-wafer soggy on his tongue, and swallows, and shreds the envelope too to follow it down. His lips and tongue burn with paper cuts and the paper presses uncomfortably against his gorge. A fullness, a certainty, him without her and her within him, a part of him, the ink-curled shape of her pain running in his veins.

* * *

He opens the door without knocking. She lies in bed, neither asleep nor awake but some crepuscular state in between. A pen droops between her fingers and a piece of stationery rests on her lap; when he looks at it, the ink marks have the size and shape of words but none of their meaning. There haven’t been new letters for a long time now — or at least, none that have arrived in the box downstairs.

Sun streams in through the windows, and there’s a draft from the bad fitting. In the old birch outside, there’s a flicker of movement. A stir of black wings, perhaps, or maybe just the wind in the branches. Lincoln closes the curtains to close off the cold air, and replaces sunlight with the small familiar glow of the overhead light.

He takes the pen and paper away first and sets them on the nightstand, in between bottles of pills and boxes of vinyl gloves. She mumbles an objection, but doesn’t reach for what’s been taken.

The bed isn’t the queen-sized one where Dad used to sleep too, but a smaller one, the kind with sides that fold up and where the mattress can lift to make a recliner or lie flat like a bed. Dad’s shape is still here though, the valley of his shoulder and side carved into the thin mattress in the little space left beside Mom. Lincoln crawls into that hollow. He moves carefully but the bed judders when it takes his weight and he sees the tremor that crosses her face. He swallows his sorries and lays his head on the pillow. He doesn’t want to imagine his life without her either. He touches her hand, waits for a flinch or frown, and finding none, clasps it tighter. For the space of this breath, at least, she is still his, and that is a small silent celebration of its own.

Her chest rises, and rattles as it falls again. Tears slide out from beneath her shuttered lashes. Lincoln kisses her cheek, and salt-fire burns his lips. For a moment, the faraway light in her eyes burns a little brighter. Then she closes them again, and lets her head fall to the side. He closes his too, and lets her grief lick away the marrow of his bones to make room for itself beside his own.

 

* * *

About the Author

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her short fiction has also appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Escape Pod, The Dark, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and her novellas Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters and Local Star are forthcoming in 2021 from Tor.com and Interstellar Flight Press respectively. A graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, she also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, an online magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her family and a very good dog named Commander Riker.

Categories: Stories

Persinette

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:05

by Elizabeth Walker

“She kept me leashed and muzzled as she pried scales off me and trimmed my claws to the quick to get ingredients for her potions.”

My sire was a dragon held to be greedy even by the standards of our breed. He drugged my mother and stole me before my shell had even had a chance to soften. He sold my egg for gold to a witch. The witch, Otha, wanted a tame dragon, and Father wanted more treasure for his hoard.

He should’ve remembered hatchlings can hear through our shells, and Mother had whispered her love to each of us. I was born knowing the wrong that had been done to me. As my egg opened, and I tumbled into Otha’s waiting arms, I set her hair afire.

She kept me leashed and muzzled as she pried scales off me and trimmed my claws to the quick to get ingredients for her potions. Eventually, I chewed the leather off and set her workshop on fire.

She built a tower in the woods, pierced my wings, and chained me there. She perfected a spell to be inflammable.

I might’ve been able to rip my wings loose and tumble out the window to freedom, but I’d never worked up the courage to sacrifice so much. I hungered for the sky like it was an itch in my blood. Was it foolish to let my present life wither away in pain and darkness for the hope of sun and sky? I didn’t know, but that was the choice I made every day anew. To wait, to hope.

“Persinette”, she called me. “Little Parsley” for the rich green of my skin. “Persinette, I do not want this,” and she would gesture at the stone tower.

I had grown bigger than her at last, my scales hard, and I shifted my weight, letting her see the muscles move. I laughed when she jumped.

Scrawny I might be, but I was a dragon and, when a dragon moves, humans watch, like mice waiting for the owl. I had few joys, but making her afraid always pleased me.

She railed at me some more that I should submit. Become her familiar, her helper.

My stomach churned with disgusted weariness, a queasy brew that conjured dry ashes in my mouth. I hated her, but I wanted out of this tower.

She must’ve felt my resolve melting because she crossed to the second window she usually left shuttered and threw it open. “Here, enjoy some sun while I’m gone.”

I yawned, baring my fangs, trying not to show how good that bit of light felt baking into my scales.

She left, humming as she climbed down my tail. I had grown too large, and the only way I fit was if she pulled my tail out the window. I’d asked her: didn’t she fear some knight coming to assassinate me? And she’d laughed because she’d enchanted my tail to look like a long vine.

Alone now, I sang the song Mother had whispered to her eggs. Our flames burn together, never apart... Loving sentiments of how she’d always love me, find me. I’d been trilling her song out windows as long as I’d been alive. But Mother hadn’t found me. I was losing hope she would.

Something tugged my tail. Otha?

“Persinette! I’ve heard your song. I’ll rescue you!” A man. I could hear him muttering as he climbed, “A real maiden in a tower, like the stories!” He leapt inside, dressed in purple velvet.

At last, a human I could burn. The ashes in my mouth turned to rich, living flame. I spat fire, and his hair caught. He fell out the window, landing with a crack in the thorn bushes at the tower’s foot. The bushes must’ve saved his life from the fall, but it didn’t sound like he would thank them for the favor.

The screams stopped eventually. My visitor had dragged himself away to die somewhere else. Perhaps I should’ve just eaten him.

A proper dragon would’ve known.

I crooned Mother’s song, trying to lighten a heart that couldn’t be soothed.

* * *

Otha returned in the morning. “You burned the prince and blinded him!”

“The thorns did the blinding.”

“Word’s out there’s a dragon. The king is combing the woods.” Otha looked at me in despair. “How am I to get you away, Persinette?”

“Leave me, and don’t seek to tame a dragon.” I kept my body still, but my heart hammered. The king would topple the tower and chop me to pieces. I’d never know the sky. Never see Mother—

Something massive settled onto the roof, making the shingles creak. I cringed. The king’s men here already?

Part of the ceiling tore away, and a great golden eye peered in. As the eye focused on me, I heard a rumble of pleasure.

A trill of delight escaped my lips. “Mother!”

Otha fainted.

* * *

Mother carried Otha off with us, clenched in her talons and screaming almost the whole way.

With me, Mother took great care as she snapped my chains and scooped me out of the tower. She carried me home on her back, and I closed my eyes and spread my wings over hers, feeling the way her muscles moved, feeling the cool air slide over my scales like a caress. “How did you find me, Mother?”

“That prince you set ablaze. Word spread through the kingdom, even to our hoard. I went searching, and then I heard your song and followed it.”

“Will Father be happy to see me?” The father who had betrayed me, stolen the life I should’ve had?

She hissed. “I ate your father. Foolish beast, did he think I’d forgotten how to count?”

When we reached home, Mother gave Otha to me, and though I couldn’t burn her, her spell did not protect her from my teeth and claws. She made a small enough mouthful in the end, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever had such a satisfying meal.

After, I settled into a warm ball with Mother and slept. Tomorrow my wings would taste the sky.

 

* * *

About the Author

Elizabeth Walker is a writer, a swing dancer, a business operations person at NASA (by day), and definitely not three velociraptors hiding in a coat. Elizabeth lives in Southern California with her family and one yowly cat. You can find her online at www.edwalkerauthor.com and on Twitter @AuthorEDW

Categories: Stories

Puss Reboots

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:04

by Rachel Ayers

“Puss checks on his investments and makes some more, sells a new app for cat owners to a development company, and eats one of the master’s shoelaces.”

Puss is magnificat, terrificat, fantasticat. He is all that is feline grace and modern machine. He is IntelliCat09 (patent pending). And pending it shall remain, for his dear master, Mr. Mark Carabas, has passed on, leaving his greatest work unrecognized.

The inventor left the cat to his youngest son, Tom—of course Puss knows who belongs to whom, but he’ll watch out for the lad. The boy was quite put out. Thought he’d be better off with the house or car, like his older brothers got. He’ll know better soon.

“What am I supposed to do, skin you and eat you?” young Tom asks. “I’ll starve while my brothers go on with their great lives.” He kicks his ratty couch and flops down for an evening of video games.

Puss settles himself in the economy apartment. Not even a plot of lawn for frolicking! No matter, they’ll be better off in a twinkling, if Puss has his way. Perhaps in the meantime, an unlucky moth will wander in—entertainment and a snack.

He’s quickly connected to his new Master’s Wi-Fi, and the world is open to his curious mind.

Hello, Master,” Puss sends to the lad’s private messenger from his screenname, Cattitude09.

“Who’s this?” Master responds.

“It’s just your poor cat Puss. Stop muttering threats of eating me, and I’ll make you a much better meal than I would, so to speak, make.”

“What? Who is this? Is this Michael? It’s not funny, Michael.”

“Tis I, Master. I am logged into your Wi-Fi. Your old dad gave me a few modifications before he died. Give me a chance, and I’ll provide all you need.” Puss jumps onto his lap and purrrrrs away, kneading claws deep into his thigh.

“Oww! Puss?” Tom says out loud, scrutinizing the cat.

“Yes, Master. Your father wanted you to be provided for, so here I am.”

“Is it really you?”

It’s probably fair that young Tom is skeptical, but the repetition is starting to bore Puss. The cat deigns to give a humanish nod of confirmation.

“Oh…oh jeez…” Master says, sliding down in his chair and staring at Puss.

“Never fear, Master,” Puss says via messenger. “I’ll have us taken care of in no time. Just trust me!”

A few switched digits, some numbers shifted, and they have a new bank account, a mystery identity. Mr. Carabas has a modest account, but it’ll serve to get pizza and catnip delivered to Master’s humble abode.

Full of pepperoni and anchovy, Tom slumbers. Puss spends the time watching the traffic zip by on the road below and wandering the streets of the superhighway of information. The stock market tutorials zip through his mind at cheetah speed.

Getting on with his business, Puss makes a few investments in careful places, and Carabas Enterprises is born, a tiny company with a tasty portfolio. The rest of the night is spent chasing the salt shaker around and around the kitchen floor—it makes a most satisfying rattle.

The master seems upset by the salt on the floor. He gives Puss a perturbed look as he inspects the bottoms of his feet. Puss gives him the Look of Utter Innocence (patent also pending) in return. Perhaps he should have thought of that before he failed to provide any cat toys.

Master returns to his computer where he half-heartedly pretends to do his programming job for an hour, then checks to see if there are any new messages on his findtwueluv.com account. Puss checks on his investments and makes some more, sells a new app for cat owners to a development company, and eats one of the master’s shoelaces. Then he orders some catnip mousies. Master sighs and stares at the screen.

It isn’t hard to persuade young Tom to take a long lunch break, and soon the two are outside, Puss rambling elliptical around the lad. The apartment complex Tom lives in is tired and depressing, though Puss finds some roaches to chase, cheering himself right up. Half a block away is another building, this one with green grass and butterflies, lawn ornaments and a pool. Puss connects to the building’s Wi-Fi with only a little bit of trickery, and sends a message.

“Take a dip in the pool, Master,” he says. “You’ll feel better.”

“It’s not my pool, Puss,” Tom mutters.

“What’s the point of a life you never enjoy?” Puss asks, and Tom thinks about that for a minute, and then pulls off his tattered t-shirt and jumps into the sky blue pool.

He’s swimming lazy circles when he meets a resident of the local complex, a pretty woman with dark eyes and dark skin. Tom strikes up a conversation with surprisingly little awkwardness, and soon the two are laughing about a movie or a music or some other incomprehensibly human humor. The only thing Puss can tell for sure is that they like each other: the pheromones on these two.

Puss lazes in the sunny grass until he catches a whiff of something foul. There’s a lurker in the shadows: soon Tom’s princess spots him too, and makes her exit, bolting back inside like she’s the vole to the lurker’s hawk.

Tom doesn’t linger once the princess leaves, but he’s got much cooler cat vibes when he returns to his computer.

It’s an easy matter to hack into Master’s findtwueluv.com account, and only a little bit of jiggering the back end of the platform to bump him to the top of the princess’s suggested profiles, and soon the two are chatting in cyberspace as easily as they had IRL.

“Tell her how much you like her.”

“It’s not that easy,” Tom says. “I don’t want to rush things and scare her off.”

Puss paws around some more and finds the lurker, and a string of ignored messages in the PrettyPrincess’s buffer from BigTroll23 suggest that the lurker has been around for a while. If young Master isn’t careful, the ogre will move in on his best gal.

Not if the cat moves in on the Troll’s territory first.

Some research and blatant disregard for privacy laws later, Puss knows all about Mr. Lionel Draco, pseudonym BigTroll23. He’s got his own programming company and a history of sleazy online transactions.

Puss spends a few days watching investments grow, money marching into the Carabas account like mice tricked into a trap. Puss arranges for the groceries to be delivered, as Master mopes about his Princess or spends his time at unenthused programming.

BigTroll23 has noticed Puss now, too: he’s watching Carabas Enterprises. He’s poking around to find a weakness, and Puss knows he will try to take them down if he gets the chance.

They circle each other cyberspacially, testing for weaknesses. Puss sends masses of coded viruses to his databases, but he’s too strong for that. Puss must put on his trickster boots.

BigTroll23 buys out a company called Lion’s Share, which creates spyware for phone apps. Puss feels a rare sense of intimidation. Puss writes a program called Mouse Details. He knows the Troll will want it. It’s perfectly marketed, and the other companies Puss does business with jump on it. The mole-ware won’t affect them.

Puss watches the sales, and sure enough, BigTroll23 picks it up (for a hefty profit to the cat’s company).

In a matter of hours, it’s eating through his databases, purging thousands of users’ personal information. The Troll’s got one chance: a complete reboot of his servers.

BigTroll23 goes for it, and in a swift move while he’s shut down and not looking, Puss buys him out.  The cyberspying evidence goes to the FBI; that ought to keep the ogre busy for a bit.

“Check it out, Master,” Puss says when the boy hauls himself to the computer the next morning. “We’re rich. Go get your Princess now.”

Master wades through the paperwork, frowning and printing out hard copies and trying to understand. “You’re wasting time,” Puss messages. “Go get started on your Happily Ever After.” (patent also pending)

The last order of business is finding a nice house in the suburbs: a good yard with bushes to hide under, birds and squirrels to stalk, and some lovely neighborhood lady-cats to charm. Master now has the means to show PrettyPrincess a good time, and a nice place to bring her home. By the end of the year they have all three moved in, and Puss eats cream and tuna every day.

Carabas Enterprises sells out to some other companies Puss has a hand in. Those Trolls can be persistent, and Puss doesn’t want him to find them… too soon.

Of course, playing cat and mouse keeps life interesting, when you’re the cat.

 

* * *

About the Author

Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes and hosts shows for Sweet Cheeks Cabaret and looks at mountains a lot. She has a degree in Library and Information Science, which comes in handy at odd hours; she obsesses over fairy tales and shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.

Categories: Stories

The Tech

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:03

by James L. Steele

“Tech had watched the pack take down and eat dozens of people, and he was right there, behind the cameras, zooming in and zooming out, panning and focusing.”

Five monitors on the desk took up three sides of the tiny room. Behind them dangled a mess of wires, power strips, and CPUs that generated so much heat Tech had disconnected this room from the heating system months ago.

Tech sat in the chair, turned to the right-hand desk. The brown rat wore no clothing. His clothes, phone, wallet, and car keys had been stashed in a drawer elsewhere in the building, and as long as he was on the job, he was not allowed to wear them. Nobody wore clothes in here because Alpha said this was a place to shed civilization. Tech’s fur had become grungy over the last few months. No matter how hard he washed, he couldn’t keep his fur as preened as it had been when he first started.

The views on the other monitors were too distant. This monitor showed the activity up close, and he watched the pack of wolves in the warehouse.

It was full of fake trees, fake grass, and fake shrubbery. The lighting mimicked moonlight, but had highlights from all angles to reduce the stark shadows. The only natural objects were the boulders sprinkled here and there. How the wolves got them in the warehouse without raising suspicion Tech did not know, and he had not asked.

He also never asked where the prey came from. Over the last few months he’d seen several dozen elk, rabbits, rodents, and even other carnivore species in the warehouse running for their lives. They never had clothes on, so he couldn’t tell where they came from, but their fur was never in good shape when they entered the forest. Tech guessed the wolves pulled people off the street who would not be missed. The sick. The weak. The homeless. The forgotten.

The elk on the screen limped across the plastic grass. A bite wound on the leg bled profusely, and part of a bone jutted out. Eight wolves emerged from the trees and washed over the rocks like water, converging on the wounded person. The cameras did not have audio, but the various microphones around the warehouse did, and they piped the sound directly into the control room. Tech heard every snarl, every howl.

They surrounded the elk, some of the wolves perched on the rocks, others on the ground cutting off his escape routes. Tech reached for the joystick and adjusted the zoom on the three nearest cameras to frame this moment better. The elk dropped to his knees, unable to run any farther, and out of places to go.

“Please!” he cried. “Don’t… Please let me go! Please let me go!”

With a snarl, the wolves descended on the elk. Tech’s first instinct was to look away, but instead he adjusted the tilt of a camera at ground level to make sure Alpha was well-framed making the kill.

The pack consumed the elk, and Tech switched to multiple cameras, taking in the feast from every angle, every zoom, anything to make it look more engaging.

The rat’s gut rose. He reached for the trashcan, keeled over, and vomited twice. As he sat doubled over in his chair, coughing, he turned to the unclothed wolf sitting by the door. Tech didn’t know his real name. As far as he was concerned, none of these wolves had names.

Beta sat on a chair by the entrance, padded hands behind his head, legs spread apart, which funneled Tech’s gaze straight to his crotch. He was smiling at the rat.

“Still haven’t grown a pair, have you?”

Tech’s ears folded back, and he snorted the last of the stomach acid from his nose. He slid the trashcan aside and turned back to the monitors. He adjusted the views from all fifteen cameras, checked the audio from all thirty microphones. One of the cameras was dark, and two microphones were out as well. He grumbled, wishing the wolves would stop damaging the equipment.

After twenty minutes, Alpha stood and left the kill. The others picked up the bones and followed him out of the warehouse and into the area that had once been the offices, now converted to a rec room. They were out of view of all the cameras.

Tech reached to the center desk, clicked the mouse a few times. The cameras still picked up the warehouse from every angle, but nothing recorded now. He turned on the second computer, sat back in his chair, and caught his breath.

“Was a buck this time,” said Beta. “Maybe I should tell Alpha we need to find a rat for the next one.”

Tech wanted to cringe, but showing weakness would not be a good idea. It was bad enough his scent probably reeked of fight or flight. This was the first time Beta had watched him since he had installed the first five cameras and showed them what he could do. They seemed to like the rat back then, but in recent weeks the entire pack had taken to nipping his ears every chance they got. Beta especially. Tech did not face the wolf when he spoke.

“Find one with light-colored fur. They look better in this light.”

“We try to make you happy.”

“Make yourself happy. Everyone knows you make the best kill vids. They don’t know it’s thanks to me.”

“If it was up to me, there’d be no videos. It would just be us and the hunt.”

“There’s no money in keeping it all to yourself.”

Beta growled, shifted in his chair. Tech had heard that growl before. It wasn’t aggression, but amusement.

The second computer had booted up and interfaced with the camera server. Tech began pulling the video feed from the most relevant cameras. He also pulled the audio from all the microphones. Camera windows and audio graphs began filling the monitor. He already had an idea for how he was going to splice all of it together, and Tech began dragging them to the adjacent desktops, organizing them by angle.

He began with one of the wide shots of the pack entering the fake forest. Then he spliced in the view from one of the ground cameras in the trees, a view of the elk as he woke up naked and helpless. He then inserted another ground camera view of the pack scenting their prey. A quick cut to a top-down view showed them forming up as a pack. As he worked the video, he also lined up the audio pickup from the microphones all over the warehouse. He had installed enough insulation to cut down on the echo, and now there was no way to tell this all took place in a warehouse in the middle of downtown.

Tech knew cameras and security systems, wiring and control switches, networking and equipment installation. He’d had to learn audio engineering and video editing on the job, and he wanted to be so proud of his ability to adapt and learn new things. He wanted to be proud of his work.

He had a rough cut of the hunt ready by the time he smelled Alpha at the door. Tech did not turn around, but kept working, steeling his body and hopefully his scent.

He felt a hand on the back of his chair and a muzzle over his shoulder. Tech made sure to have a camera feed showing the actual kill playing on the monitor in front of him.

“Perfect!” The wolf slapped the back of the chair a couple times. “Damn, that’s good! Tech, how did we do this without you?”

Tech was not his real name. Tech wasn’t sure if he had a real name anymore.

“You didn’t,” said the rat.

Alpha laughed. “How long for this one?”

“By the end of the day. I could finish it sooner, but your fourth wolf took down a camera in one of the trees.”

“It happens.”

“The more equipment they damage, the more it costs. If you don’t want it cutting into profits, be more careful.”

“Money ain’t the point.”

“You want to go back to your day job?”

Alpha gave an amused growl. He turned his head and addressed Beta.

“I’ll watch the Tech. You join the others. Tell Fourth it’ll be his turn next hunt. Punishment for damaging a camera.”

A chair creaked, a large wolf stood, growled, and left the room. Alpha rose from behind Tech, dragged the chair from the door, and took a seat next to the rat.

“Beta doesn’t like you.”

Tech had become quite good at working while wolves talked to him. He had already synched up the audio from the best microphones and strung the video into a rough feed. He was examining other camera angles now, fine-tuning the presentation.

“I know.”

“He complains about the cameras and the audio and all this equipment everywhere and having to duplicate tapes on his spare time, but he also got to quit his job. He’s been like that since we were children. He wants paved streets but gripes about the construction. Don’t know how his wife deals with it.”

“He has a family?”

“So do I.”

“You shouldn’t tell me that.”

“You’ve been here long enough, Tech. Knowing a little more about us will help.”

The wolf sniffed in the direction of the trashcan. Tech winced and continued swapping out camera angles and making sure the audio was synchronized. Alpha watched him work for a few minutes.

“Ever think about trying it?” Alpha said.

Tech stopped. He hadn’t looked Alpha in the eye in a week, and now he turned to the wolf. Alpha’s grey fur and arms had been painted in false colors to disguise his identity on camera. He still had blood on his muzzle, chest, and arms.

“As prey?” Tech said, swallowing.

Alpha smiled. “As a predator.”

Tech blinked.

“You’ve been watching us for months. Aren’t you curious?”

Tech blinked again. “About committing murder?”

When Tech first met these wolves, they had nine-to-five jobs such as banker or manager of this or that, all friends of Alpha’s. Over these last few months, he had watched them become a unit that moved as one, acted as one, killed and ate as one. It had begun to carry over to their personal lives. It had been a fascinating transformation, one an expert in psychology should have been here to witness. Every time he thought about it, he trembled, and his gut rose. He beat the thought down and calmed his breathing.

“No.”

Alpha smiled. “We’ll find you something small, put you in the forest. I’ll be at the cameras, and you can let yourself go. Let the urges take you. You know there’s a reason the videos we make sell so big. People want this. Everyone out there wants to do what we’re doing, but they can’t. Gotta be civilized and all.”

Tech had read about that in college. It took thousands of years for civilization to form. Technology replaced the need to hunt for food. Now it was all manufactured, predator made peace with prey, and everyone lived together.

But some highly-educated people said predators subconsciously needed to take life to be happy. They needed an outlet, and if one looked hard enough, one could find videos of predator species chasing down and killing real people. Tech had watched one a long time ago, at Alpha’s apartment, and he couldn’t believe anyone would be part of that, let alone pay money for it. He never imagined he would be holding the camera just a few weeks later.

“I’m a rat. Rats don’t kill.”

Alpha smiled. “Oh, yes they did. You’re just too used to thinking of yourself as a civilized person.”

“I don’t need to take life to feel good about myself.”

Alpha leaned close to him, muzzle to Tech’s ear. “I guarantee if I put you in there with another rat, you’d go nuts. Especially if neither of you ate for days.”

Tech shuddered. He hated it when Alpha talked like this because Alpha could make things like that happen. The large wolf leaned back in the chair again, smiling, showing the blood still on his teeth. Tech felt his gut rising.

“What would that be like?” said the wolf. “Editing your own kill vid. I’d pay money just to watch you do that!”

Tech stood, reached over the monitors, and flipped the switches to turn on all the overhead lights in the forest. He walked to the door.

“I need to look at the camera Four took out. You wanna come with me?”

Still smiling, Alpha pushed Tech’s chair aside and rolled to his place at the controls. “I’ll watch from here. Takes me back to my younger days, watching my first kill vid. Did I ever tell you about that, when I found my father’s stash under the bed?”

“Yeah. You weren’t even a teenager.”

Tech did not wait for Alpha to continue. He walked around the corner, down the stairs, and into the warehouse. The forest reeked of death. Tech often cleaned the place up and tried to make it smell like a forest, and he guessed he did a good job, as nobody ever complained.

He approached a plastic tree, and sure enough the camera was missing. He looked around the fake grass and found it seven feet away, smashed and broken, the wires ripped from it. Tech gritted his teeth and grumbled as he strolled to the maintenance closet on the other side of the forest. He opened the door, pulled out his tool bag, one of the spare cameras, and two microphones. Alpha had given him quite a bit of money to use for maintenance, and seeing it go to good use must have earned him trust with the pack. He slung the bag over his shoulder as he walked back to the tree.

He dropped the bag by the fake trunk and fished for the wire strippers. He cut the wires down to useable length, and stripped the tips. He attached them to the camera, pulled out the power drill, and began mounting it.

This branch was at eye level, one of many designed to capture the action from the ground. Nobody else had this. There were kill videos circulating all over the country on the black market—too hot even for the internet—but none of them looked like this. None of them had rigged lighting in the ceiling. None of them had cinematic angles. None of them had audio.

Tech had first met Alpha in a coffeehouse. They were strangers, but somehow the conversation moved to these illegal videos. That naturally led to discussing Tech’s profession in security systems. Then Alpha started asking Tech questions. Before he knew it, Tech was at Alpha’s place, watching one of these kill vids. Then another. Then another. Tech had been horrified, and he remembered glaring at Alpha, wondering what he had gotten into.

Then the wolf offered him a job. Alpha believed he could make a better video, but he needed somebody who knew cameras. Someone who would be okay working under these conditions.

And Tech said yes.

In fact, he was not okay with this. He despised the pack’s attitude, he loathed every hunt and every frame of footage he had to splice into their videos. Tech had watched the pack take down and eat dozens of people, and he was right there, behind the cameras, zooming in and zooming out, panning and focusing.

The camera was mounted. Tech replaced his tools, picked up the bag, and walked through the forest to the first broken microphone. He knew the place so well he could tell which were out just by the gaps in the soundscape fed to him in the control room. He stopped at a fake shrub and inspected it. The microphone had a few claw-induced gashes in it. Tech knelt by the stand holding the microphone, took out a screwdriver from the bag, and loosened it.

This whole enterprise had begun with five cameras. Tech knew the best places to put them, and the first kill was a trial run, using only a quarter of the warehouse. He had seen his first rabbit die that day. She had lasted a long time, too—the personal friends Alpha had gathered dragged her death out for several minutes. She pleaded, cried, begged, as everyone did, and Tech heard every word, every snapping bone, every bursting blood vessel. Then he had to edit all of that into a video for sale to people who enjoyed watching this kind of thing.

The video looked so good even Tech had been impressed. Tech hoped never to do that again, but it sold. Alpha gave Tech money for more equipment, plus a full share, as if he were one of the pack making the kills with them.

Alpha had proven to be an openly honest businessperson. He showed Tech the sales figures, breaking down the money they took in and what went where. Everyone knew how much everyone got for their part in it, and it was more money than Tech knew possible. There was a huge market for this stuff.

The old microphone was off, and Tech slipped on the new one. It required no calibration or aiming, so Tech packed up and meandered through the forest to the next microphone.

This one had been zip-tied to the branch of one of the fake trees. Tech paused and studied it. The thing looked as if one of the wolves had tried to take a bite out of it. Tech set the bag down, pulled a pair of clippers from it, and cut the zip-tie.

Since that first kill, Tech had spent his days mounting and calibrating new cameras. Running wire required a lot of crawling through dirty spaces, drilling holes, and feeding it through. He often spent the night in the warehouse to expand the coverage. Some of the pack even helped him. They had liked him back then. Now the wolves seemed to look down on the rat, Beta being the most aggressive about it.

They were up to fifteen cameras now. Between kills, Tech replaced damaged equipment, cleaned blood off lenses and microphones, ran wire, adjusted lights, and cleaned and rearranged the landscape. He had even insulated the walls, both to cut down on the echo, and to prevent noise from leaking outside. How nobody noticed this warehouse, Tech had no idea. He suspected Alpha had bribed some people who wanted in on this, but Tech had never asked.

The rat was lighting, sound, camera, set designer, director, and editor. He credited himself in the vids as “Tech,” and the name stuck. Alpha had told him he was famous in certain circles, and if he was interested, he’d introduce him to those circles. Tech had said no every time, insisting he didn’t want to go too far into this.

The new microphone was mounted, attached, and wired to the system. Tech dropped the broken mic into the bag with the other. He pulled out the old camera and navigated through the forest back to the control room.

Alpha was still in his chair, his eyes on the monitor showing one of the top-level cameras looking down on the part of the warehouse where Tech had been working. Tech wasn’t threatened by this. The wolves always made sure he didn’t leave with any pieces of video or other evidence. It was unlikely anyone would be convicted for these videos, as the wolves painted their fur with different patterns and colors before going on the hunt, and the law usually required scent identification, but just in case, they left nobody alone in this warehouse.

Tech handed the broken camera to Alpha. The wolf took it, looked it over.

“I’ll pull up the feed,” said the rat. “I think he smacked it on purpose.”

“I already did. Fourth did take out the camera. Third and Sixth got the microphones.”

“Need more of a punishment than just sitting out a hunt to watch me work.”

Alpha rocked back and forth a couple times, tenting his hands in front of his muzzle. “Did you notice them in the forest?”

Tech stiffened. “I didn’t see anyone.”

Alpha clicked the mouse a few times. Now the rat leaned over the wolf’s shoulder and watched. There he was, in high definition color, stripping wires and mounting the camera. The matrix of video feeds showed every angle possible all around the factory. The fourth wolf was crouching behind a tree, watching Tech. The third wolf was also in the forest, behind a rock, scenting the rat from a distance. And the fifth. And the sixth, seventh, and eighth.

The rat on the screen finished mounting and aiming the camera, then moved through the forest to the microphone. The pack had surrounded him, advancing from tree to tree, closer and closer. The naked, helpless rat knelt and replaced the microphone as a pack of wolves closed in. A few microphones had picked up tongues licking muzzles.

Bag in hand, the rat on camera walked to the second microphone. The wolves followed, so close they could reach out and touch Tech, and the rat never noticed. Two wolves, Seven and Five, were right behind him while he knelt and replaced the equipment, almost breathing down his neck, teeth bared. The poor rat remained oblivious.

Then the rat gathered his tools and walked to the control room. The wolves followed him, stalking him through the trees and behind the rocks but never making themselves known.

Alpha stopped the video, turned in the chair, and faced him directly. Tech backed away a step, shivering.

“Funny thing about being in a pack,” Alpha said. “You start to see everyone who isn’t in it as walking meat. I’ve been keeping them back for weeks, but I don’t think I can hold them anymore.”

Tech’s gut was empty, but it still rose to the back of his throat.

“I don’t wanna lose you, Tech. I like you. I like you a lot. But it’s too serious to think I can stop it from happening. Until you prove you’re one of us, you’re just meat. Even I feel it. So here’s an idea.”

Tech heard claws clicking on tile. He smelled the rest of the pack standing at the door to the control room, all eyes pointed straight at the back of his head. Alpha rose from the chair and walked into Tech’s personal space, holding eye contact. Tech looked up to meet his eyes.

“You’re not going home tonight. The pack will find another rat.” He smiled. “We’ll make sure it has light-colored fur. You won’t eat for a week. You won’t sleep. Neither will your prey. Then we’ll dump the two of you on opposite sides of the forest and put some meat in the middle. You know what rats used to do to each other when there wasn’t enough food?”

Tech dropped the bag. He really was shivering. Alpha held his shoulder, standing much too close for comfort.

“Relax, Tech. Once you taste the kill, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.”

Tech shivered harder under the wolf’s hand. “I don’t want to be like you.”

Alpha smiled. “I think you do. That’s why you’re still here.”

“I need a job! Nobody’s hiring and I need money!”

“I didn’t assign people to sit here and watch you work just to punish them for breaking microphones. I told them to break equipment so we could observe you. I’ve seen it myself. The way you watch us when we’re making kills… You need that trashcan because you’re afraid of yourself.”

Tech clenched his teeth. “This is hell!”

“I knew you enjoyed it the day I showed you that first video. Anyone else would have bolted out the door and never talked to me again, but you stayed. You watched more. You feel it. You watch those people, and you want to let yourself go, too. That’s why I gave you the job.”

“I am not… I do this shit because I have nowhere else to go! I hate it! I hate coming here and watching you!”

“I don’t believe that. You’ve wanted to ask me for months if you could try it, haven’t you? You stare at those cameras, and you wonder what it’s like. Just the thought… All you had to do was ask, and you can feel it, too.”

Tech couldn’t catch his breath as he convulsed. Alpha rested a hand on Tech’s other shoulder.

“Tell me, Tech. What’s on your mind? Why are you still here? Do you want to?”

Tech shook under the wolf’s grip. He couldn’t tell if Alpha was speaking, or if Tech was talking to himself. Realizing this held him in place. Hearing someone else speak his innermost thoughts was more terrifying than being surrounded by wolves covered in the blood of their latest kill. Still shaking, he stood straight and looked straight into Alpha’s eyes. All he could manage was a whisper.

“Please.”

Alpha smiled. “I knew you were one of us.” Alpha turned him around and faced the rest of the pack. “It’s time to show them you’re not prey. We’ll clean up and start making tapes while you’re getting ready. I’ll run the cameras this time. Do you have any idea what people will pay to see two rats tearing each other apart? I’ve never found a kill vid of that!”

Tech had forgotten how big these wolves were, and all of them were covered in elk blood. They were still hunting him.

“You’ve never been in the rec room have you?” said Alpha. “Come with us. It’s time to join the pack.”

Alpha led him by the middle of his back into the midst of the wolves. Tech walked with them down the stairs and through the forest. He looked from side to side. He was in the middle of a pack of eight, large wolves who had tasted the kill and enjoyed it.

As Tech walked, his nerves calmed. He expected to feel anxiety, knowing what lay ahead, but instead he felt relief that he wasn’t meat.

The pack moved as one, thought as one, killed as one, and now Tech was among them. That could be him, too. His mind explored the possibility, and he expected to dry heave, but it did not happen this time. Instead, he pondered that soon he would experience how it felt to act without consequences. By the time he stepped into the rec room with the pack, he had stopped shivering. He now smiled in anticipation.

 

* * *

About the Author

James L. Steele is a writer in Ohio. He is often asked to sum up his life’s story in a single paragraph. James is very depressed by how easy this is. He is the author of Huvek, available through FurPlanet, and the Archeons series, through KTM Publishing.

Visit his blog at DaydreamingInText.blogspot.com, and his twitter @JLSteeleauthor
Categories: Stories

The Sewers of New York

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:03

by Elinor Caiman Sands

“You stop in mid stride, jaws open. Everyone is turning, pointing and yelling, running away from you.”

A: You haven’t eaten for two months so you creep up slowly through the steaming manhole, claws grasping the concrete, and step out onto the busy sidewalk. Here the lights of Manhattan are overwhelming, as is the stinky traffic and horrible indigestible donut smells. It’s really not a nice place to be. But you’re soooo terribly hungry. Got to try something; you’re way too young and too little to go to the great swamp in the sky.

So what do you want to do? Choose B if—yay!—you want to try nomming a passing tourist. Their tasty-looking ankles scurry in every direction. They smell soooo delicious. Choose C if that’s too scary and much better to go back down into the sewer.

* * *

 B: A yummy-looking man with “I love NYC” t-shirt and khaki shorts lingers not six feet away on the sidewalk, obviously a tourist. He’s stopped to take a photograph and is gazing up wide-eyed at the skyscrapers; he hasn’t noticed you at all.  So you sidle closer past a stern-looking woman in a green suit. At first the woman doesn’t notice you, but then she does. And screams.

You stop in mid stride, jaws open. Everyone is turning, pointing and yelling, running away from you.

The delicious man dashes into a nearby department store as you snap at his heels, while wailing sirens echo down the street. Several NYPD squad cars pull up and a bevy of policemen pour out reaching for their guns.

You flee north along Seventh Avenue, dodging yellow taxis and fire trucks which are now also chasing you.  You pass a store called “Lacoste.” Its logo looks a lot like you—a friendly creature—how wonderful! Perhaps you should trundle in and seek sanctuary as rather a lot of burly men are tumbling out of a nearby fire truck waving poles and duct tape. But maybe not, as the store is still run by humans, and humans don’t seem to like you.

Though you’re getting terribly weary now. You stop by a newsstand and spot another manhole. It’s far from the one where you started but somehow you sneak your claws beneath the rim and prise off the lid. Slithering back down to the dank tunnel below feels soooo good.

You exhale a deep bellows sigh. What a horrible experience. Better never try that again, no matter how hungry, no matter how nice it was to see the sun. Humans really don’t like you.

Better go to C.

* * *

C: It seems like the sewer you call home really is the only option. Fortunately there are plenty of nice dank tunnels down here so you wander off in search of yummies. And hello, what’s this? A funny-shaped log with scales floating in the murk? But no, it’s Aunt Agatha, huge and ancient and covered in grime and algae, and she’s nomming a tasty fishy. Actually, she’s not that big really or even that old—your kind used to get so much larger once—but she’s way bigger than you are, and not nearly as friendly.

Yet the fishy smells sooo good. And your belly is rumbling: so very hungry.

What do you want to do? Go to D to try to steal it, though she doubtless won’t give it up so easy.

Or just sigh, go to E and let Aunt Agatha eat in peace. Considering her age, size and foul temper it might be best to leave her be.

* * *

D: Aunt Agatha lays in the gloom of the tunnel, nomming the beautiful fat, silvery fishy. Aunt Agatha’s jaws are huge and extra elongated and super warty and still have more than enough teeth; but you’re sooo very hungry. So you sidle towards the cunning old reptile with your most winning smile. Then you make a quick dash forward. You try to seize the fishy in your much smaller jaws. But Aunt Agatha turns. She takes a little sidestep. She smacks you smartly on the snout with her tail. Ouch! Then she swivels and flees into the darkness. The old girl is gone, and so is her dinner. So much for that idea. Go to E.

* * *

E: This appears to be a dead end. How boring. It looks kind of familiar too. Surely you’re not going in circles? Never mind, must just keep traipsing along; plenty of fish in the sea. At least, there used to be.

Dinner will turn up soon, surely; something will come along before you suffer the same fate as the American Crocodile.

Go to C, F or H. It doesn’t really matter which. Every choice will bring you to H eventually. But might as well be alphabetical: so go to F.

* * *

F: There must be some food along these tunnels somewhere. You’re really getting ravenous now. You’ll eat almost anyone. You mean anything. Erm. Wait, what’s this wooden crate? A label on the side reads: “Certified Environmentally Sustainable.” Something is also scratched there in the old scaly tongue. In the gloom it reads: FISH YUM YUMMY FISHY DINNER AGATHA. (English translation: Aunt Agatha’s personal larder. Claws off.)

Your eyes widen and your belly starts to rumble even louder. But what are you going to do? There must be fish inside, but Aunt Agatha surely wouldn’t be happy if you nommed all her tasty dinners. She’s already in a pretty foul mood, surely.

Go to G if you want to smash the box and tuck in anyway.

Go to H if you are too scared. Aunt Agatha might chomp you into pieces and put you in the crate as well, and you’re far too young to go to the great swamp in the sky.

* * *

G: You are so incredibly, insanely hungry by now you seize the wooden crate and throw it into the brick wall where it splinters into several pieces. Tins of Scottish Farmed Salmon roll out, lots of them. How wonderful! You pounce on the nearest can and chomp down on it, ignoring the taste of blood on your tongue as the tin buckles and you cut your mouth on the sharp human-made metal. You can smell the heavenly fish as your enormous mouth waters; you’re almost there. But just as you’re about to chomp down once more, a mighty hissing comes from behind. It’s Aunt Agatha come to check on her hoard. Oh no! She doesn’t look happy. She rushes towards you with jaws open. She’s vast, perhaps twelve feet long, four times your length. The tin clatters to the ground, and you flee as fast as your little legs will carry you. Fortunately you are much nimbler than old Aunt Agatha, so you make your escape, though you are still unbelievably hungry. Your belly aches, it’s so empty. Go to H.

* * *

H: Eventually exhaustion overcomes you and you stop running. You’re not so strong anymore, not to mention way too hungry; your beloved sewer is just an endless warren of barren brick. You keep trudging along although it’s starting to smell worse as well. You haven’t been this way for many a year, but you don’t remember it ever being this vile.

You lope around a bend and there it is, the source of the terrible stench: a giant, oozing fatberg. Your jaw drops at the white gloopy mass of human waste, grease and wet wipes that blocks the passage from floor to ceiling. You gag so much you have to stop breathing. Fortunately you can hold your breath for a very long time.

You’ve heard these things exist in other cities but how dreadful to find one in New York. Your heart aches though you’ve never been one to rail against the world; and you no longer have that kind of energy.

No more progress can be made this way. Go back to A.

* * *

What are you still doing here? You should be back at A. Yes you’ve run out of sewer to explore but you’re not the type to give up. Keep going, there’s always possibilities.

Yet you are practically starving now. Your legs are so weak they’ll barely lift you; your eyelids droop with weariness. You want to weep great crocodile tears, but you’re not, strictly speaking, a crocodile, so that would be unseemly. Instead you tramp along the tunnels struggling to keep your chin up, belly rumbling.

A hundred years ago, so the old tales said, life was so much easier. Then your kind lived much further south, and basked in the sunlight, and swam in heavenly fish-filled swamps. But those days are only dreams. Just have to make the best of life as it is.

There’s a bright light ahead; all sunshine and blue skies at the end of the tunnel, but it can’t be. You blink your nictitating lids and drag your long little body that’s so heavy now towards the light. At the exit a great stretch of water, dotted with mangrove trees, water lilies and pretty white snowy egrets teems with wonderful fishies. Your eyes go wide. It’s paradise.

You step out into the brilliance and slip into the water. Soon the sun on your back is making your scales tingle. You’re starting to feel strong again. You move to snatch up one of the tasty fishies but then you stop—you’re not hungry. All your life you’ve been hungry. But now the terrible gnawing ache is just a memory, and even that is fading. You’re free at last.

A log floats by. Hollow logs litter the banks all around. Might as well stretch out and bask as your kind were always meant to. This is sooo much better than living in a sewer. You smile—of course you do. You’re always smiling. Except this time it’s from the heart.

 

* * *

About the Author

When she’s not sleeping, or chasing fishy dinners in her alligator guise, Elinor Caiman Sands writes science fiction from her secret location in a chilly English swamp. She’s had short fiction published in the Defying Doomsday anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists (from Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press); the Strange Bedfellows anthology of political science fiction (Bundoran Press) as well in Cosmos Online and elsewhere.

She can be found at: https://ecaimansands.com/ and on Twitter @ECaimanSands (her “serious” author account) and @Daisy_the_Gator (Gator’s account). When a gator, she invariably claims to be a huge one, but she really isn’t, as human Elinor isn’t a very large person, being a dwarf, as you can see from the photo.

Categories: Stories

Issue 11

Tue 1 Jun 2021 - 03:02

Welcome to Issue 11 of Zooscape!

When the world is crushing in all around, what do you do?  How do you survive?  Perhaps, you find an animal to lead the way, or an animal to stay close by your side.  Or maybe, to survive the pain, you turn into an animal yourself.

These stories are profiles of characters surviving in the space between their worst fears and their greatest hopes; characters surviving pain, making choices, and letting themselves discover the animal inside.

* * *

The Sewers of New York by Elinor Caiman Sands

The Tech by James L. Steele

Puss Reboots by Rachel Ayers

Persinette by Elizabeth Walker

Him Without Her and Her Within Him by Aimee Ogden

A List of Historical Places Frequented by a Boy and His Dog by Eleanor R. Wood

Miss Smokey by Diana A. Hart

Palmerino’s Dream by Joana Galbraith

* * *

ANNOUNCEMENT TIME!

Big changes are happening at Zooscape.  Our mission is to share the wonder of furry fiction with the world and help get furry recognized as the legitimate genre of fiction that it already is.  To that end, we are doing some restructuring, helping to move us toward the goal of becoming a SFWA qualifying market.  This means:

1)  Starting with the December 2021 issue, our pay rates will increase to 8 cents/word for original fiction with no payment cap.  As our September issue is already locked down, every new story we accept from now on will be paid at pro rates.

2)  In order to pay for this increase in rates, we will be going back to our original plan of three issues per year.  We plan to publish on December 15th, April 15th, and August 15th.

3)  Depending on how these changes affect the flow of submissions, we may have to make additional changes to our slush reading schedule.  However, for now, we will wait and see what changes seem most likely to be helpful.

We are once again open to submissions!  And we’d love to see a story from you.

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, check out our Patreon.

Categories: Stories

Issue 10

Mon 1 Mar 2021 - 04:56

Welcome to Issue 10 of Zooscape!

This issue of Zooscape would like to invite you to have coffee with dolphins, travel to Jupiter with dragons, and visit heaven with crabs.  Unfortunately, it can’t, because none of those things happen in these stories.  Oh, there are dolphins and coffee; Jupiter and dragons; heaven and crabs; but they’re all mixed up in a different order, and you’ll have to read the stories to find out what order they’re actually arranged in.  Think of it as a treasure hunt that will take you to outer space, the afterlife, and back again.

* * *

Dance of Wood and Grace by Marie Croke

The Lonely Little Toaster by A Humphrey Lanham

How to Safely Engage in Telepathy with the Dolphins of Ocean Paradise by Elizabeth Cobbe

Bliss and Abundance by Nicholas Stillman

Heart of Ice by Anna Madden

And the Red Dragon Passes by Emily Randolph-Epstein

Kypris’ Kiss by Slip Wolf

Coffee and the Fox by Mari Ness

Dominion by Christine Lucas

* * *

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, we have a Patreon.  And while we are currently closed to submissions, we will re-open on June 1st, 2021.

Categories: Stories

Dominion

Mon 1 Mar 2021 - 04:54

by Christine Lucas

“By noon, the Serpent was annoyed. None of the Garden’s animals had humored her.”

On the morning of the Seventh Day, the Garden of Eden was calm and peaceful. The Serpent stretched. She had to fix that. Perfection was very, very boring.

She crawled through the tall grass to the pride of lions sunning their fur in a clearing by the Euphrates’ bank.

“Hey, did you know what lambs are made of? Meat. Fresh and juicy meat. Why would they be made of meat if you weren’t supposed to eat them? Go on, give it a try,” she whispered to a lioness, her scaly tail pointing at a herd grazing close by. She had never liked lambs.

The lioness rolled over, her amber eyes half-closed. “Too hot to run. The lambs don’t bother me, so I don’t bother them.” She yawned and continued her nap.

Disappointed, the Serpent moved on to a brown bear eating berries by the river.

“There are fat fish swimming in the water,” she told him. “Juicy, writhing salmons and carp, filled with nutrients for great fur. And they taste much better than berries.”

The bear looked up, his muzzle smeared with juice. “But I like berries. Why should I get wet and harass the carp?”

By noon, the Serpent was annoyed. None of the Garden’s animals had humored her. God’s last creations, the furless bipeds, seemed promising, but she hadn’t dared to approach them. According to the sparrows’ gossip, He had made the male after His own image. And judging by His blatant preference for lambs, the outcome couldn’t be good.

Curled around the Tree of Life, the Serpent decided that Creation needed fun–mischievous–creatures. She had watched Him do it from clay with the humans. How hard could it be, especially with the aid of the forbidden fruit? Across the grove, the man scratched his crotch, watching the clouds. It couldn’t get any worse than that.

She gathered a pile of soft soil from around the roots of the Tree of Life and curled around it, kneading and shaping to the best of her abilities. Perhaps the humans’ opposable thumbs had indeed some merit. It took her the better part of the afternoon, but she finally stretched and inspected her handiwork.

The creatures looked good: one male and one female, for all creatures needed a mate in life and an accomplice in mischief. She had made the male bigger and thick-headed, with fast claws and toxic urine to leave his mark all over Creation. The female was more delicate, but faster and fierce when defending her litter. The Serpent lashed her forked tongue and hurried up the Tree of Knowledge. The full moon was ascending and she hadn’t finished.

She grabbed a fruit and squeezed it over the creatures, anointing them.

“I give you knowledge of Good and Evil,” she whispered, and a sudden breeze shuffled the foliage around them. The clay animals trembled, the mud turning to fur and flesh. “I give you sight to see through the dark hours of the night and through the darkness of souls. May the moon be your ally, may the sun warm your fur. Tread fast, tread soft, and knock down all fragile objects in your path.”

She breathed in and spat at them.

“I give you free will, your choice either poison or cure. Whatever divine spark lays in me, I share it with you.”

A tremor ran through the Garden. She rubbed a fruit from the Tree of Life on them, and dried clay fell of, revealing soft fur underneath.

“Cats, I give you Life. Go forth and multiply. Do it often, do it loudly, until your offspring overruns Creation.”

The kittens blinked and sniffed the air. Their eyes glowed, reflecting the moonlight. When they noticed each other, she held her breath. Their eyes grew huge, their backs arched and their tails stood rigid, upright and fluffed up. Bolder than her ginger mate, the calico kitten dared a sniff of his muzzle. A shy lick followed the sniff, and in no time they were curled together, grooming each other. Soon, they grew bored of grooming and started chasing each other’s tails.

Perfection isn’t always serious.

The kittens stalked unsuspecting fireflies, shredded leaves, and clawed their way up onto the branches of the Tree of Life. The Serpent lay belly up beneath it, laughing herself breathless. It was almost dawn when the kittens, exhausted, climbed down. They curled by the Serpent’s coiled body and fell fast asleep, their whiskers and tails twitching in dreams of hunt and mischief.

True perfection is never boring.

* * *

The next morning, the Serpent sunned her scales, watching the kittens play. She’d have to feed them soon. They’d probably manage to catch bugs or even a frog on their own, but she’d rather keep them from hunting until they were old enough to defend themselves. And, hopefully, hunt decent prey, like lambs.

A sudden movement caught her eye. Barely turning her head, she spotted the human female hidden among the thick bushes a few paces away. Wide-eyed, mouth agape, Eve watched the kittens play. The serpent lashed her forked tongue and stifled a snicker. Behold the solution to the kittens’ feeding problem.

“Come closer, Eve.”

Eve licked her lips. She walked out of the bushes, each step slow and cautious. She reached out to touch the kittens.

They fluffed up and arched their backs. The calico growled and showed sharp little claws.

Eve pulled back her hand, her brow furrowed. “Why is it doing that?” She turned to the Serpent, her eyes moist. “Why doesn’t it like me?”

“Perhaps it’s hungry.” She tilted her head toward a nearby plain. “There’s a herd of cows grazing over there. Perhaps if you brought them some milk they’d let you pet them. They are very soft, you know. And they purr.”

Eve blinked. “What is ‘purr’?”

“Purr is bliss,” she replied and watched Eve hurry to the nearest cow. The purring had been her greatest idea. It overpowered the opposable thumb any time.

* * *

By noon, the kittens had warmed up to Eve. She brought them milk and they rubbed their backs against her legs, played with her hair and curled on her lap, purring.

Half-asleep, the Serpent lay content under the Tree. Her work was complete. She had created perfection and found a guardian for the little ones. At the threshold of a dream, a male voice somewhere close awoke her.

“Eve, where are you?”

Eve’s gaze darted from the napping kittens in her lap to the source of the voice and back. The calico stretched and curled tiny paws over her face. Eve’s shoulders slumped.

“I must go. Adam needs me.”

The Serpent stretched her neck. She couldn’t let her leave–not yet. Not for him.

“Why does he need you?”

“Um, to gather fruits, and comb his beard, and –”

The serpent rolled her eyes. “Can’t he do that on his own?” What’s the point of having an opposable thumb if you don’t use it?

“Yes, but –”

“The kittens need you more,” she hissed. “They can’t milk cows.”

Eve glanced over her shoulder. “I suppose I could stay a little longer.”

* * *

“WHAT IS THIS?”

His voice was thunder and lightning and Eve fell face down on the ground. The kittens started from their nap with a hiss and climbed up the Tree of Life. The Serpent remained calm and stretched her upper body, certain she saw Adam’s ratty face hidden in the bushes at the back.

Amidst a host of angels and seraphim, their Lord God appeared before them.

“What have you done?” He turned his fiery gaze to Eve. “Have you not a mate, woman? Go to him. He has been looking for you everywhere, sick with worry.”

Eve stood up and hurried away.

He turned to the Serpent. “Call them down.”

She snickered. “Even if I do, they won’t obey. I forgot to include obedience when I made them.”

God raised an eyebrow. “Of course you did.” He stroked his beard and then waved at one of the seraphim. “Bring them before me, so I can inspect the full extent of the Serpent’s insubordination.”

The seraph flew to the kittens perched upon a branch. “Follow me to your Lord God.”

Their eyes grew wide, fascinated by the incessant flutter of the seraph’s six wings. The calico outstretched her forepaw to catch one. She licked her whiskers, wagged her behind and lunged at the slowly retreating seraph. A heartbeat later, the ginger kitten followed her.

Amidst hisses and a cloud of torn feathers, the unfortunate seraph flew to its master’s feet. An archangel hurried to its aid and managed to detach the berserk kittens from the torn wings.

The kittens stood at God’s feet, and He leaned over them. The ginger kitten was busy chasing a floating seraph feather, while the calico seemed mesmerized by God’s beard. She attempted to paw one of the long white tendrils, but the feather caught her eye and she went after that instead.

“Insolent,” He said.

“I call it free will.”

The kittens now chased each other around God’s feet, oblivious to the imminent danger.

He frowned. “I gave Man dominion over all creatures. They should obey him.”

“Kittens didn’t exist at that time. They are excluded from the deal.”

“They will only disrupt peace. The fruit is forbidden for a reason.”

“You said not to eat it. You never said anything about other uses.”

His frown deepened. “Semantics.” He waved to His host. “Lucifer, escort the creatures out of Eden.”

“No!” She darted forward, placing herself between kittens and archangel. “They’ll never survive outside.”

“They are not defenseless. You should know that, being their creator.” His voice was firm but not unkind.

She hung her head. “But they are just babies…”

God signaled to Lucifer, who stood shifting his weight from one leg to another. “Well?”

Lucifer bit his lip. “My Lord God, they will not come.”

The kittens cowered at the roots of the Tree, a multicolored bundle of hissing fur. God turned to the Serpent.

“They will listen to you.” The promise of flood and fire now lurked in His tone. “See to their needs, but escort them out.”

Defeated, she nodded. “But will they endure? You’re omniscient. Please, tell me.”

He tilted His head sideways. “So be it. This I tell you: they will be revered as deities and hunted as demons. Often my mortal servants will know them to be not of my making. They will deem them evil, drown them in water and burn them with fire.”

“And you will do nothing to stop them?”

“I do not advocate their actions, and they will not go unpunished.” He smirked. “What happened to your support of free will?”

“It has gone with the kittens.”

* * *

The Serpent escorted the kittens through the wilder lands to a secluded oasis. They’d have fresh water there, and trees to climb on, and unsuspecting frogs and birds to hunt. But they’d be alone, easy prey to all the dangers that lurked outside Eden.

Back in Eden, she could no longer sleep in peace, her dreams now tormented by images of the kittens suffering. She had to find them a guardian, to shelter them in the eons to come. Had He not said, “See to their needs?

Come morning, she climbed up the Tree of Knowledge and grabbed a fragrant fruit, then headed to the clearing where the humans dwelled.

“Eve! I have something for you.”

 

* * *

Originally published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

About the Author

Christine Lucas lives in Greece with her husband and a horde of spoiled animals. She’s a retired Air Force officer and mostly self-taught in English. Her work appear in several print and online magazines, including Daily Science Fiction, Pseudopod, and Strange Horizons. She was a finalist for the 2017 WSFA award and a collection of her short stories, titled Fates and Furies was published in late 2019 by Candlemark & Gleam.

Visit her at: http://werecat99.wordpress.com/

Categories: Stories

Coffee and the Fox

Mon 1 Mar 2021 - 04:54

by Mari Ness

“Humans, as it turned out, did not deal well with foxes trotting into their stores and ordering coffee.”

The fox hires children to bring him coffee every day.

He had discovered the wonders of coffee, and the even greater wonders of handcrafted espresso drinks, quite by accident, when a human woman had left her single sourced Kenyan blend with soy on a bench without a lid, and then, followed this up by leaving a vanilla soy latte on a neighboring bench – again, without a lid. It was quite safe to say that the fox became obsessed, and equally safe to say that it was a difficult obsession to indulge.

Humans, as it turned out, did not deal well with foxes trotting into their stores and ordering coffee. Just entering a café presented difficulties, with doors slamming shut, things flying in his general direction, and – in one particularly awful case that the fox still remembered with a shudder – a gun getting pulled out. And that was when he could manage to open the doors at all.

(Why did humans make their doors so heavy and hard to push and pull? It was one of many mysteries that the fox feared he would never solve.)

Ordering once inside was no easier. Most refused to believe that the voice they heard was indeed coming from the fox, assuming that it had to be some sort of trick. In some cases, they even pulled out those horrible things humans called cell phones to take videos – something virtually designed to get the fox into serious trouble, if and when anyone took those videos seriously. Almost no one would take his order. And then he had the issue of payment – he had no access to those plastic things humans used, of course, but the café staff seemed reluctant to take paper payments from him, even when he was careful to barely lick and chew them.

All before either trying to drink the beverage in the café, in front of numerous eyes and cameras, or attempting to take out his handcrafted beverage without spilling a drop.

And always at the grim risk of being captured and turned into some sort of performing animal. Others had managed to conceal their ability to speak after capture, but he was not naïve about his own character: he would start blabbering away at the mere hint of withholding coffee.

So. Children.

They present their own disadvantages, of course. Some are simply too young to be able to enter a café and order coffee for a fox without extremely awkward questions. Some are simply too old, too adult, to believe that a fox – a fox – could really be asking them to make a coffee run. Increasing numbers do not speak English or Spanish, the only human languages the fox has any mastery of – though he prides himself on his fluency in no less than 50 animal languages. And, of course, the children must be approached when no adult is around – something that also presents a difficulty.

And the children, alas, are just not reliable. One would hope – and the fox has hoped, more than once – that his status, as a talking fox, would keep them fascinated, but this hope – unlike the handcrafted coffees – has so far proven unfilled. Which means he must keep searching for new children, again and again. It is exhausting.

Fortunately, he has coffee.

When he can, the fox pays the children in hard cash, robbed from individuals careless enough to leave their backpacks and other bags unattended in parks. The fox is not particularly good with zippers, but he knows a few crows who owe him various favors – and who are not unwilling to help if it means a chance at a fresh baked scone or banana bread.

Unfortunately, the fox and the crows find fewer and fewer paper bills in backpacks these days. The fox blames the increasing use of cell phones for everything, including buying coffee – really, do humans not realize how dangerous those things are – though the fox could equally blame the ever louder warnings about certain thieving crows.

Whatever the reason, however, it means these bills must be saved to pay for the handcrafted coffees, scones, and slices of banana breads. The fox might – and does – steal from humans, but he would never ask their children to steal for him. He does have some ethical standards. Not many – as he would be the first to admit – but some.

And as a practical matter, the fox highly doubts that any of these children could steal a venti soy hazelnut without getting caught.

And so he pays them in stories.

In advice.

In promises of vengeance.

And if, afterwards, people notice a rise in fox bites, or a few mysterious animal break-ins that happen to shatter some priceless, beloved possessions, or even a corpse or two, necks marked by sharp teeth –

Well. Animals will be animals.

No need to let that deprive the fox of his morning coffee.

 

* * *

About the Author

Other short stories by Mari Ness can be found in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Nightmare, and Diabolical Plots. Her poetry novella, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, is available from Papaveria Press, and an essay collection, Resistance and Transformation: On Fairy Tales, from Aqueduct Press.

For more, visit her website at mariness.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter at @mari_ness. She lives in central Florida.
Categories: Stories

Kypris’ Kiss

Mon 1 Mar 2021 - 04:53

by Slip Wolf

“I can’t love a coffee shop enough to marry one.”

I’m in a small part of heaven.  My delicate feline nose picks apart what my eyes already feast on; inside the glinting glass hull of the French press, the coil-rimmed filter, carrying grounds from the toasted gold above, descends. A caramel head of froth crowns the results.  I pick up the press by its warm stem, pour with care so no drops escape the bone-white mug with its silver-leaf logo reading Kypris on its flank.  Steam rises as I set the press down and stir the cream upward.  I delay the moment with bated breath, then another. In heaven there’s no need but I do this because savoring is no less wondrous than having. Then a Moroccan kiss touches my lips and passes on.  I love this place. I savor my solitude amongst kindred but separate souls and feel the sands of time settle as they always do here. This is a small part of heaven.

A Madeline cake would be wonderful right now. My loving coffee shop dotes on me, the sea-shell confectionary on my plate spongey and fragrant as my coffee. Crossing lanes beneath my nose I can move from baked sweetness to off-bitter bite. The coffee is exquisite. “I love this place.”  I say to the shop. “I love you.”  Is there sugary perfume on the napkin that I dab at my lips?  I finish the next page in my book and set it down. It will be here when I return through the red door frame onto these ebony, ivory tiles. Everything is where you leave it here. I wander the streets, my shoes scuffing the cobbles under a perfect dusk.

Home is an apartment that is a cloud that is a cradle in the sky, glass walls that see for infinity in every direction. Slumber finds me if I want it, but mostly I get to meditate on all the others milling below on their way to and from whatever enclaves of heaven wait for them.  A movie house, a painted cave, a parlour of flattering mirrors, a lush lick of wild jungle.  There’s a slice of heaven carved out for everyone.  Nap time.

I was somewhere else once. The end was irrelevant, as the beginning of what came next was enrapturing. The blue sky became a pale iris, the pink dusk a rose garden under clouds.  I don’t remember the cat I was before I came. To do so would, I suppose, recall some pain or shortcoming. I danced from cradle to rest, bright in my moment, hopeful for the next day, but alone. I remember that much. A solitary creature, my happiness or lack of it was in books and tuna and grooming. I think. These are all inseparable parts of me in some way. I don’t remember what I toiled at or what reason I had for doing so.  I could have walked or I could have loped on all fours. I don’t remember that either. Did I wear these clothes? These off-whites and meditative greys?  My fur is the same color so maybe this is an extension of me. I’m lithely naked whenever I feel like grooming, clothed again when I follow certain paths, seeking the perfect flower to adorn my breast pocket as a corsage. Whatever I need to be to be happy, I am, as I suppose I was where I came from. And what I am now, as I’m sure I was then, is alone.

I pass a braided coyote on the way into the coffee shop, tail swaying, teeth shining above a caftan that looks like a Navajo sand-painting unfinished with itself, winding in an unfelt wind.  Her claws click on the polished tile as she passes me with kind eyes and leaves through the same red door frame through which I enter.  A rabbit, a lion, a dolphin, a horse. In duos or trios they occupy their spaces inside the café.  My space waits for me, single chair drawn back, book open face down. The press and mug wait empty. When I sit, they are ready. My coffee shop has ticked the seconds off till I return. The press descends and the pour is perfect. How well Kypris café knows me.

I sit; I read my Proust. Laughter and talk around me is musical as a brook. There are no distractions in heaven, well, none that aren’t welcome. The draperies framing the window behind me brush my back and cool air breathes a caress into my shoulder, like the coffee shop’s very soul is teasing me in affection.  “I love this place,” I repeat behind closed eyelids, and then, to the walls and windows and tiles and brass and wood collectively, “I love you.”  It feels good to say that, to acknowledge how much a part of me this place is, this oasis of calm in eternity, this space of repose and rejuvenation. This must have been an important part of what came before, wherever that was. It doesn’t matter.

Coffee replenishes. The currents of surrounding chatter wind round one engaging topic after another.  I stay alone. Then I leave.  My return to the cloudy domicile this time is naked, slinking and leaping from high rooftop to rooftop. The ghosts of caffeine have my tail in the air the whole way.  Slumber finds me in perfect peace once again.

Next day the coyote is back, this time in a black kimono, white paint stark against the red on her toothy lips, black lining her wise eyes.  She gazes at me for some time as I seat myself, book and press at ready. There is an empire cookie on the plate, tart and sweet, icing like a wink.

My mind is absconded by the words on the page, but only momentarily. I realize the coyote is talking to me.

“What?” It’s been some time since my voice was used with another here. I squeak, mouse-like.

“I’m saying your proposal has been accepted,” the coyote says in the manner of congratulations.

I fidget a moment, having lost my place on the page.  I look over the black nose on that painted white muzzle and cock my head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Of course you understand. We all have someone for us here, someone who shares us, completes us. You found yours,” the coyote said as though pointing out the obvious.

I know of course of the trickster dispositions of coyotes, of the way they wind you in wiles. She’s having fun at my expense, obviously.  “I don’t know what you’re speaking of,” I mutter, ears swiveling in confusion.

“Always alone,” the coyote says.  “Or so it seemed.”

“I like the freedom solitude affords,” I answer honestly and she clicks her long tongue.

“But you love,” the coyote grins. “Just like the rest of us. Love brought you here again and again. And that love was accepted. Now it is done.”

“What is done? I’ve accepted nothing.”

The coyote rises gracefully and begins to glide to the door. “Everything is where you leave it here, especially your affection.”

I wrinkle my nose. The other mammals in here regard one another over the waft of java’s team, paying us no mind. She lowers a paw to my shoulder and the bracelets chase each other to her wrist like an abacus adding the universe up.  “You and Kypris are married now.”

“What?”

“I will leave you alone.” The coyote does, sashaying out the door frame which shines its crimson shine.

I am left with my coffee and my questions. My coffee wafts strong. The sun is warm on my shoulder. The drawn drapes tickle my neck.

Soon enough I’m home. I don’t have to sleep. So I don’t, unthinking.

Next day I hurry back, and linger in the open doorway of my coffee shop. The coyote is there again, dressed in a blue cloche and a flapper dress.  She smokes her cigarette through a lacquered stem and stares off into space. So I settle in my seat, resume my book and sip my coffee. There is a sense of peculiarity in the air, as though I’m missing something important. The white frosted cake is exquisite, soon gone to the last spongey crumb.  I read my novel as it spools the woe of a love unrequited, and I wonder with amusement at the needs of creatures to find affection for themselves in others.  Such a strange predilection to thrive in such a way. Whatever wants I was once slave to, such was not it. Chimes sing above the distant cash register which itself rests un-manned and has never rang once in all my time here. The chimes are either in agreement or chiding me. I know this is for me alone.  I am the only creature who listens and I laugh when I remember yesterday. “Can you imagine being married to anyone?”  I ask nobody in particular.  I sip my coffee again and something brushes my lips.  I look into my cup and see a small fragment of something floating in there. By the glint of icing sugar I can see its more cake.

I feel the coyote at my side even though she casts no shadow. “Happiness where you least expect it,” she laughs. “There are still surprises, even here.”

My ears swivel.  “What surprises?”

“I told you. You are married. You and Kypris. This is the first day of a honeymoon that may never end.”

I could laugh, but I can’t. I could sputter, but the sweetest caffeine ambrosia in heaven isn’t for the most startled throat to choke on.  “You can’t be serious.”

“You found its kami. It found your heart. That was enough.”

“I can’t love a coffee shop enough to marry one.”

“Have you never loved a place before?”

“Before here?”  I frown. It’s a strange feeling to frown, no less than feeling confused. “I don’t remember exactly who I loved.”

“Who.  So you believe that true affectionate love is only granted between people like us?” The coyote is even more amused now as she sits across my small table from me in the space that up until a moment ago needed no chair nor had one.

“I don’t know,” I say, feeling consternation that has become alien to me. “I never thought of love that way at all.  This place is important to me.”

“And you love it for that reason. I’ve heard you say it. So did Kypris. What’s to deny? Love brought you here. Love keeps you here. It always does. I’ve got to go.” The coyote rises.

“Who are you?” Different feelings are pulling me from different directions, and everything feels a mess. My throat is dry and the dark potion awaits, but it has become suspect.  “Did I know you before?”

She doesn’t meet my gaze. “Everyone knows someone like me from before. It’s not important.”  She puts her paw on the red door frame as she passes through, patting affectionately as though on the shoulder of a friend. “I’ll leave you two.”

“Where are you going?”

“To play billiards. Or roll in a meadow. There’s quite a few options.”  And she is off.

I frown into my coffee, which hasn’t cooled from the way I like it one bit. Reading my books and drinking my ever-filling mug. Nothing about it needs to be personal. My solitude, in and of itself, is the whole point.

More white cake has appeared, this time with a tiny frosting rosette in red. I regard it for a while before I go back to my book, reading more about a man who sought love where it was not to be found and failed to learn. Fools are so much more interesting to read about than the wise. No interesting surprises ever befall them, do they? I’m having trouble paying attention to the book in front of me, glancing back to the rose-bejeweled cake and back. I’m not hungry. When I leave through the red door, I leave it behind next to my book.

I wander alleys back, tail twitching. Night passes, then a day and I lay in my cloud, thinking on the details of my coffee shop. It wasn’t made for me. Too many others share the space for it to be just mine. They are as real as I am; I know it. Life has a gravity, a warmth that you can sense. None of us here are shades of a life, but the purest essence.  All Kypris café’s other patrons are paired, or trioed, or collected in larger groups. Is that why the shop has given its love to me, the solitary visitor? Or are there others who share it?  I don’t recall there ever being love like this in what came before this place. Is it good that I don’t remember?

Perhaps it is all a lie. Perhaps the coyote has spread this to others and there are several of us, each assuming Kypris café has given its love to us and us alone. What a trick that would be. But the whole idea is senseless, making fools of so many people.  Just me then.

I am seeing a half truth, tying myself in needless knots. It makes no sense for paradise to allow such a thing.

The next day, I am unable to focus on my book at all. I look up and study all of Kypris’ furnishings and decorations collectively and separately, all organs of a whole.  The shop has the aged appearance of something musty and lived in, but conversely spotless and highlighted with bright spots. Stained-glass chandeliers, brass fittings and wood panels, and here and there frames of red, highlighted by the prominent hot-red door frame in which the French-glassed oak door rests, eternally hinged inwards. There is no sense of a closing time. I would imagine there are nocturnal souls who visit when heaven’s lights are low and licks of sodium and neon create beckoning beacons all up and down this street. So strange that I am so rarely nocturnal, and never here.  But then I remember; I can’t read clearly at night.

Nor can I now.  I’m barely another paragraph ahead in my book before I’m drawn up anew by some crackling of presence around me, not just in occupied, warmed chairs all around me filled by cheerful bodies, but in the empty corners, the details of my world drunk in and absorbed and taken for granted.

The treat today is an almond croissant. I take a few bites that tingle my senses, but something doesn’t feel right. There’s a cloying sense of deliberation in the air around me. I’m being crowded with sightless intent, doted on by dextrous hands unseen.  I’m being smothered by an attention that is at once invisible and ever present.

I close my book and leave feeling uneasy, but break from tradition. The croissant receives only a few bites, but the book comes with me.  There’s a distinct cold stirring in my wake as I leave, no words spoken to myself, the other patrons, or anyone in particular.  I’m home soon enough, on my cloud, book open but too tired to read now. Slumber gauzes the eyes and the senses and another day has passed.

The next begins with trepidation. My book is under my arm, poking at a lilac corsage I’ve picked along a garden path, and as the red portal of Kypris café appears, the well-worn fragrance of ground coffee bean and spongey, desert decadence entice me in.

But the uncertainty is still there, that feeling of disturbance deep within. Entering suddenly entails more than I can comfortably fathom.

I move on, avoiding the wet shimmer on the window panes as my passing reflection ripples across them and out of sight. Out in the endless light I walk the thoroughfare of heaven, into the throng of other souls in joy and repose, passing other waystations of their amusement. Jazz and toasted tobacco smoke rolls out of a club with doors wide and no lineup and a snap in my step that urges me to smooth down my lapels.  A bakery tickles my whiskers with scents that dab my tongue with marzipan and sugar icing, and I see cakes filling a frosted window that stands the fur on my shoulders on end, countless exotic offerings sampled by gourmands of every species. All the while the disturbed goods bake themselves back into replenishment with fragrant splendor on their azure cornflower pedestals. I sidle up to the open door, as all doors in heaven necessarily are, and rub my narrow flank along it to gather a bit of its scent. Then, perfumed in sweetness, I’m up a drain-pipe and sneaking past a soft-shoe dance chorus of multiple mammalian species of matched grace at a rooftop garden party, stopping momentarily to drown my confusion in a sip of sweet bubbly from a champagne pyramid at the shindig’s edge. Soon I leap back to heaven’s side-walked earth and come face to face with another open door on an open portico and familiar signs with universal symbols.  A ring-handled cup on a saucer lets off steam in rough gold-leaf filigree. The sign above the door says, rather tacitly, Angel’s Gin and Java.

I check and see that the book I’d lost track of during my flight from Kypris is still under my arm, a part of me in that strange alchemy of paradise, but still something to be set down. I enter the coffee shop, smell unfamiliar smells, and take a seat at an empty booth near a window.  The vibe in here is wholly unfamiliar, not welcome, nor exclusionary. Wallpaper and tryptychs of pastoral landscapes with hedge-leaping horses and parasol bearing foxes glint in oily light.  The clientele is thick, but isolated and among the teapots and mugs I see sporadic beer pints and highballers, along with a martini-glass borne by a lizard who sips away in an opiate torpor.  The coffees are spiked by liqueurs and the teas are paired with mustily strong edibles that overwhelmingly stain the air.  I find a seat and take it, reading my book. Nothing manifests at first as I read, then finally I look up and see a coffee. Angel’s has seen me at least, and read my simplest of desire. I sip. The coffee isn’t bad, I don’t think, a bit over-sweetened. I settle in against the plush cushions, which are soft and lose myself in the sensation of welcome solitude. No mis-requited love from a place that holds any power over me, nor uncertainty at its proximity. I can get my bearings again in this place, just another building in paradise’s endless playground. No bizarre shade of needy affection chases me.

The light is just bright enough to see, then just enough to read comfortably. Stupid coyote. Feed me a line and think I can’t get away from your manipulations, or the manipulations of whatever tried to hold me to Kypris café.  In paradise we are bound by nothing, our memories sifted for the most fleeting joys, made eternal as we desire. This cat walks eternity in the grasp of no love that can bind it. The very idea is treason to all I am.  My dues to mortality are paid. I demand little of the universe and it demands nothing of me. What an absurd imposition of my identity the whole idea is; that one can love any place in the manor of another soul. Especially when you don’t want another one.

It’s hard to concentrate on my book, with its lost subject scattered into the machinations of others’ desires and repulsions. Such a reminder of the world I must have left behind in these pages, such a warning as to the follies that could have beset me had my heart lay unguarded.  Now, having nearly succumbed again, I’ve proven with a simple traipse down heaven’s artery that I will never be tied down by the ensorcellment of any bosom of flesh or wood. I’ve gotten bored; I’ve stepped out. Commitment isn’t for me, sweetie. The décor in my peripheral sight appears slightly lurid in a way I like.

My coffee spills. On its way to my lips I lose my grip on the mug stem and coffee that isn’t quite scalding but not cool either splashes onto my chest and lap.  My clothes, for I need clothes in this moment, absorb the spill and its halo of drops.

Well damn. I sit there in my booth, drops of coffee all over my front, spread across my lap and sprinkled on the underside of my muzzle. A moment passes, then a second, and the café-bar carries on as normal, none of the other raucous creatures noticing my clumsiness.

I blink. The spill cleans itself up from the table and floor. But not from me. I’m wet and dripping. Even my book has been dabbed in liquid, the page bubbling up under the spots of moisture. Well why not? If what I read is a part of me and not of this place, it wouldn’t stay intact.

One never has to change clothes or fur or skin in paradise, for all that affects what we are is with consent and as desired. Like the gravity of other places, this is a rule universally known and everywhere unspoken. I can’t think of why I would desire a soaking. Even a cool rain here is just neutrinos of tingling refreshment that fades with sensation. Most often it is the lullaby of thunder beyond Kypris’ window while I—

No. I won’t ponder her here. I escaped that place for a reason, namely the absence of reason brought on by the coyote, the trickster. My hackles, wet and dry rise and fall. She sowed the discord that chased me away. I decide I hate her.

I am still dripping with coffee and uncomfortable, so I rise and head deeper into Angel’s.  I know what a restroom is though I don’t recall needing more than a mirror in one for all my time here.  I gaze in the mirror, willing the dark stain to dry and recede into memory, but it doesn’t happen.

The thick scents that permeate this whole place have become a miasma, a low hanging smoke like cloudy dread. One should not feel this sensation in heaven. I wrinkle my nose at the stale headiness of it and realize I need to clean myself. I run water under the tap, and from icy cold the water turns to scalding hot. I draw my paw back from the torrent with a yowl and feel the sting throb and then subside.  A bang takes me off my feet as a stall opens and a goat shuffles out, horns crooked, sniffing, foul smoke curling from a mouth without a cigarette. “You don’t know why you’re here either,” he wheezes and holds up an open pack of what looks like tobacco-stuffed finger-bones. “May as well light up and stay awhile. Maybe longer.”

My whiskers twitch as my gaze falls to the pack in his bony hand. The bones in the pack are moving, whispering things I can’t quite hear.

“No. We have to go.”  A paw wraps round my elbow and squeezes my forearm.  The coyote narrows her yellow gaze at the goat, leads me away as the ragged figure backs into the dark of the stall and seals the portal with a click.

I frown as I’m led back to the door, close to the mirrors, far from the other stalls, most open and innocuous. The coyote answers my unasked question, the filigree on her golden sari catching gaslight.  “Wherever you lose yourself, you’ll find one like him. Yes, even here. Keep walking.”

In a moment, we’re back in the café proper, my sense of unease still present if subsided. My book is still on the table where I spilled the coffee, still bubbled on the open page. But I myself am dry now, just like that. I return to the table and the coyote comes with me, takes an uninvited seat. I’d bristle, but I’m not sure if I should be grateful or not.

“You followed me,” I say sourly.

“I was going to ask if you followed me,” the coyote says.  “We don’t all have one place here that’s chosen us.  Some move around.”

“Places don’t choose us.” I fold my arms in defiance and glance longingly down at the wrinkled page of my book. Will it be eternally maimed in the part where Swann laments his time wasted with Odette?  I am thankful the story has so many separate, pristine volumes. Had this happened to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I would probably weep.  “There are places where we’re comfortable. That’s what I want. Comfort and solitude.”

“And what makes you comfortable?”  The coyote’s paws grasp mine, the shock of warmth on my paws sending a shudder through me as thumbs wrap over my palm. Direct contact has eluded me for so long. Who in heaven even desires such fleshy, foolish things?

“The quiet. The solitude.”

“You can have that anywhere. Go deeper. Details, please.” Her golden eyes look up from her bowed head, ears wide and receptive.  “Please.”

“I love the simple décor. Much nicer than this place.”

A badger knocking back a pint at the bar gives me a glare over his shoulder, more pitying than annoyed.  I ignore him. “I like the way the sun dapples on the tables through the French glass in the transoms. I love the simple elegance of the cloth-covered tables and wicker-backed chairs. I love the coffee, the confectionaries, the way the place always knows what my mood wants before even I do.”  I think back to the rose-encrusted cake. “Well, most of the time anyway.”

In a corner two wolves call out a cheer in a language I don’t recognize and slam their pints together hard enough that one breaks and sloshes suds. The one with his back to me has a battle-ax affixed to his back and is nearly naked. I think I’m glad they didn’t hear me putting this place down.

“Valhalla isn’t the same for everybody,” the coyote says, following my gaze with a shrug before looking back. “It sounds like you love Kypris café. So why are you here instead of there?”

I don’t quite know why, so it takes some time to collect myself.  “Marriage, I mean, whatever game you were playing in there, I didn’t appreciate it.”

The coyote turns her head sideways. “What game?  You’re attached to that place, more than any other here. The café is attached to you, more than any other patron. What about the profession of love disturbed you?”

“Besides it not being possible?” I want another coffee and I have one, black as night and bitter when I steal a sip. This place doesn’t know me, but that’s just fine. Maybe it takes a while. “Kypris is a coffee shop, a place, an inanimate space.”

“No, it’s not.” The coyote wants to frown, I can tell, but smiles with a patience I find unnerving instead. “Here everything has a spirit, a force, an emotional agency. A place called Japan called it kami, while far North in the colder climes of the world before, Araniit, the breath of all things, affected people’s lives. We all came to know the world we exist in now in different ways, just bits of truth, gleaned or guessed while we were still wandering around wherever we were before this. Much of this is a surprise, and that’s part of the fun when you think about it. I mean why would you want to move onto a world where you already know everything, right?”

I don’t know what to say to that. The coyote’s tail wags as she waits for me to agree, then slows and rests out of sight. “You don’t have to understand everything to enjoy paradise.”

“I want to enjoy it by myself. It’s just how I am. Is that bad? I don’t love a coffee shop.”

The coyote swallows, and her enthusiasm slackens as though coming to accept what I’m saying.  “You don’t have to love Kypris back, not in that way. But we all love something, if not someone, in some way.  We couldn’t live otherwise. You could love a mountain top, or a wind-swept plain or a subway stop.  The only difference is that here, it can love you back.”  The coyote shifts in her chair. “Here, everything and everyone can love you back.”

I look into my coffee, take a sip. It’s still bitter and I miss the coffee at Kypris.  Dammit.  “So what do you do with four walls and tables and chairs that love you?  I mean…this whole thing feels absurd.”

The coyote laughs and I sense that its slightly painful.  “You consummate that love with your presence. That’s all it requires.  Understand, cat, everyone is given the gift of knowing, even if just once, what their heart really wants.”

“But it isn’t real.”  I think of the tickle of the drapes, the unceasing warmth of the sun through her windows, the perfected sensation of every bite and every sip in those walls. “I don’t know what love is, but I know this isn’t it.”

“You don’t have to know,” the coyote chides with a smile.  “Love is confusion, and yearning, and often unrequited. Your mistake is to assume it is somehow weaker for all that. Giving it with no expectation of its return is where its strongest.”  She stops and takes a breath, then sips from a cool glass that has manifested in her paw. Maybe it’s gin and tonic, maybe it’s water. I don’t ask. She stares into her glass for a moment. “Kypris loves you even if you decide to avoid her and never see her again.  Her kami, like all spirits, is for you and you are for her. You only need acknowledge that whether in an oasis, or a café, or in another’s arms, you find love for something, if not someone…”  The coyote stops and sets down her glass. “…outside yourself.”

She turns away and scans the crowd of souls congregating in the Angel pub, together, apart, content. As she turns back to me, her fidgeting stops for her to wipe a tear away.  “Just let it happen. You already have.”

“Who are you?”

The coyote lets boisterous celebration and laughter from all corners drift into our small realm of quiet. She holds her muzzle straight and dries her last tear away. “You don’t know me. You never did.  I’m just someone who sees what is.  No tricks. I was never one for tricks.”

I curl my tail around myself, and sigh, my dry chest fur rising and falling as I lean back. The coffee isn’t working. Something is missing.  I stare down at the dried book, pages wavy and rippled from water damage, willing order to return to them. This is what paradise is supposed to be, the order that follows the messy chaos of the outside, the preamble, the intro. Doubts shouldn’t torture anyone here and it’s for that reason that so much is swept from memory, consigned to insignificance. Loneliness never plagued this cat. So what plagues me now?

I look up at the stuccoed ceiling past the slow turning, brass-plated fan, and with just a slight change in focus that alters perception, even past that barrier through to the blue eggshell skin that surrounds the vast heart’s locket of this heaven for all of us. Focus again, and then one can see past it into the nameless dark.

Love put me here, safe from oblivion, and the very same found my tiny crèche in heaven, my place of comfort.  What else would possibly take the one thing that mattered most to me in the mortal coil and put it here for my enjoyment, as part of my sense of self as the tail raised behind me or the whiskers that sample every wondrous sense ahead.

“I’m a fool,”  I say glumly.

The coyote’s soft paw rests upon mine again. “We all are. It’s our most endearing quality, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t ask your name,” I realize as I rise.

“No you didn’t,”  she says as she gets up with me, adjusting her sari. “It’s Cloud. Walk back with me, will you?”

I nod, not needing to ask where.

My walking stick clicks the cobbles and I tilt the bowler I’ve adopted above my pinstriped suit.  Her sari has given way to a satin gown that follows curves from sinewed limb to cobbled ground. In another life, under other circumstances, I’d want to see how her hips sway.  Here and now, I appreciate the warmth of her paw and feel the giddiness of her lively heart as we stop at Kypris’ red arch and part ways with respectful bows.  Cloud’s parting is silent, but reluctant. The coyote fades into the crowd of another cross-thoroughfare of heaven and I rifle the rippled pages of my book as I feel the electric charge of my café, welcoming me in.  I can’t remember if I was gone hours or millennia. As Cloud said, it doesn’t matter.  The cake waiting for me next to my French press is the most delightful, airy slice of culinary sugary joy I think I’ve ever sampled.  The coffee is a lively melange of Moroccan warmth and spice. I know now I can go anywhere, but my joy will reside right here.

It may be that to be happy, even in heaven one mustn’t fully know the self, why we’re at peace with the people or things we were close to or apart from. Love is the most confusing element of any life.  I’ll never fully pierce the fog of the world before this one, where joys and pains brought me to struggle as we all did in some way. I’ll never seek out the reasons for my self-proscribed solitude, never deeply wonder if doubts were insects in my stomach.  The faces that occasionally flash before my mind’s eye with dips of madeleine cake or sips of coffee or glimpses of dusk along heaven’s distant edge will never resolve back to knowledge of family or acquaintance, friend or foe.

And I’ll never turn and see the coyote who called herself Cloud, decked just once, fleetingly, in a smudged coffee shop owners apron with the Kypris silver-leafed logo, looking longingly and lovingly across the sea of content regular patron souls, picking mine out of the throng as she had countless times before in a world all but forgotten. She’ll ache once more with curiosity and affection and a love of the kind that even when fate leaves it unrequited, fills us, grows within us and creates a place in paradise for us all.

 

* * *

Originally published in ROAR, Volume 8

About the Author

Slip Wolf has been writing fiction under a few guises for the past twelve years and has dozens of short stories out in the wild.  Currently he’s trying to finish his first novel while under COVID lockdown in Canada. He is tolerated during this process by a patient mate and two indefatigable dogs. Through it all he’s learned that Heaven can be the peaceful moments we all manage to find in the places we happen to be.

Categories: Stories

And the Red Dragon Passes

Mon 1 Mar 2021 - 04:52

by Emily Randolph-Epstein

“Root of Purity’s bones still mark the cliffs of Ashport, her soul still haunts the harbor. That is not a fate the Red Dragon should share.”

The dragons have a direct line to my mind. Their voices enveloping, filling, as though their warm, scaled bodies are at once wrapping around me and within me.

They pull me now from deep dreams. “The Red Dragon passes. Attend at dawn.”

A check of the weather app warns of snow today and dawn in an hour and ten minutes. There’ll be no lounging in the dark, warm bed this morning, not if I’m to clear the snow from my car and make the half-hour drive to Ashport. If I’m late to the Passage, then the Red Dragon won’t be able to reach the Eternal Sky. I cannot condemn her to that fate.

There’s no time for a shower or breakfast either. I’ve just enough time to brush my hair (finally to my shoulders), shave, and place a new estradiol patch on the skin of my lower belly.

There isn’t really a dress code for attending the death of a dragon. Once upon a time, there were robes. My mother may still have them, but she’d never give them to me. I settle for a heavy fisherman’s sweater that still smells of lanolin, flannel-lined jeans and a knitted cap.

Half an hour after the dragons pulled me from sleep, I’ve cleared my car and driveway enough to pull out onto the road, not yet plowed. But enough early risers have driven past that I can follow the ruts left by their wheels. The snow in my headlights is a constant streak of flakes, like entering hyperspace. Will forty minutes be enough time to make it to Ashport in this weather?

“Hurry!” The dragons’ pleas ring through my mind.

* * *

The house – four times the height of any other two-floor house – is near the village center, across the street from the brick-built library. It perches on a cliff overlooking the harbor – snow-covered to hide the black dragon bones seared to the gray granite. The door looms, the lintel neck-craningly high above me. It opens on a sliding track like a boathouse door, with a smaller, human-sized door inset at the bottom.

The boats, hauled up on land and wrapped up for winter, are visible by the light of the streetlights, and the docks are stacked in the harbor parking lot just as they were the first time I ever glimpsed the Red Dragon. She was flying over the harbor then, swarmed by seagulls, crying their nasty seagull curses. I had gone out to one of the cliffs, barely visible in the gloaming, bent on throwing myself into the sea. My toes were curled around the edge, my stomach lurching with survival instinct, my eyes squeezed shut when she gave me my true name and pulled me away from the cliff.

“Dagny.” The Red Dragon’s voice is weak now, weaker than it’s ever been before, but still, she calls me back from that miserable, miraculous memory.

“I’m here.” Light bleeds across the horizon, weak and watery. Sky and sea the same dark shade of steel. The storm hasn’t reached Ashport yet; it waits on the air, a copper taste in my mouth. Dawn is minutes away.

Mrs. Ash opens the smaller door, hair the same copper as the Red Dragon’s scales with flashes of silver by her temples, eyes red-rimmed and tear-filled. “Thank you for coming.” Her voice is nothing like the clear sweet voice I’ve heard when she takes her guitar out to the shore and sings to the dragons as they wheel above the Summer harbor.

“Of course.” Seeing her tears, hearing her voice chokes my own voice in my throat.

The mournful whines of the other dragons carry from the depths of the house, and there is a shaky womphing sound of air being forced into and out of lungs.

Mr. Ash appears behind his wife, a tall man with black hair and a mostly white beard, his eyes are much the same as hers: tear-filled and reddened.

“You remember Dagny, dear?” says Mrs. Ash. I still feel a thrill whenever someone who knew me before uses my name.

Mr. Ash squints at me, and for a moment I’m afraid he’s going to delve into the past, into the me that wasn’t me yet, but he just purses his lips and nods. “Of course. She’s always liked you.” His frown deepens. “She hasn’t eaten in two days. We’ve had to carry her outside to do her business.” He looks too small a man to carry a dragon, but then he isn’t human, is he?

Somewhere inside a clock chimes, and even the dragons fall silent listening, counting. Seven chimes. Ten minutes to dawn. Ten minutes to sing the Song of Passing or else trap the Red Dragon here forever.

“It’s time.” Mrs. Ash opens the door wider. “Please come in.”

“You’re certain?” I shouldn’t be questioning her. Of course, she knows. Knowing is a part of her business.

“As she was born at dawn, so too will she pass.” A little bit of the clarity of her singing voice returns. “Hurry.” And the dragons echo her, their voices caressing the inside of my skull.

Inside, the dragons greet us. There are three or four others depending on how you count: the twin blacks can meld into a two-headed, two-tailed dragon when they wish, though now they are separated: Daughter of Joy is glossy black; the other, Gift of Sky, is matt, light sinking into his scales, lost. They move as though mirrors of each other.

Shy, champagne-colored Shield of Pearls keeps her distance, amber eyes worried. The hatchling, Army of Peace, holds no such reservations. He has not yet reached his full growth and stands no higher than my knees though no doubt he will tower above me before he’s done. The young dragons mob me, except for Shield of Pearls, rubbing against my legs with their sinewy necks, licking my face with giant tongues, long spiked tails whipping against the reinforced walls. It might have been overwhelming if they weren’t a part of me.

“Away, my loves.” Mrs. Ash pushes through the mob of tails and scales, and the dragons fall away, lining up behind their mother like the world’s most enormous ducklings as she leads me down the cavernous hall through the kitchen, past a walk-in freezer full of hanging pig and cow carcasses, a tithe the local farmers happily pay to the Dragon People, to keep their livestock unmolested.

The air grows hotter as we progress through the kitchen to a door on the far side. Mrs. Ash pauses. “She’s through here.” There’s a weight in her words, dragging them slowly from her tongue.

The Red Dragon’s presence presses on my mind, burning like I’m standing too close to a fire. “Dagny.”

Dragons only talk to girls, my mother’s voice in my mind.

What am I doing here? It shouldn’t be me here, doing this. It should be my mother or my sister, not me. Dragons only talk to girls.

I am a girl. I put my hand on my belly, over the estradiol patch. I imagine the hormones spreading through my body, the magic potion that will allow me to shed my old skin and let my true self shine through.

I glance at my watch. “Five minutes.”

Mrs. Ash nods and pulls in a ragged breath. Her husband has gone on ahead of us, and his deep voice carries through the door. “Dagny’s here, Old Girl. You can rest soon.”

I fight the tears laying siege to my eyes.

* * *

A fire blazes in the sitting room in a hearth large enough for someone twice my height to stand straight without bumping their head. Whole tree trunks burn behind the fire screen. The heat dries my skin and burns the tears from my eyes. And there she lies before the fire: Born of Dawn – the Red Dragon.

She doesn’t lift her head as we enter, but her eyes follow us, mirrored by cataracts. Mr. Ash stands beside her, stroking her head covered in scales that once glistened in the sun, now the dull copper-brown of dried blood. Next to her, the tall man is dwarfed, delicate.

The younger dragons stampede into the room, curling up beside the Red Dragon. The twins merge, Daughter of Joy resting her head on the Red Dragon’s stomach, Gift of Sky licking at her lips. “Come.” The Red Dragon’s voice sounds in my head.

I can’t move. My knees are locked, my feet nailed to the floor. I can’t do this. I shouldn’t be here. I’ll fail. My voice will falter, and dawn will come and go, and in failing, she will be barred entry to the Eternal Sky.

The clock ticks closer to dawn. My fingers brush the patch through the thick knit of my sweater. I breathe, and I go to her.

I kneel at her head, laying my hand against her broad expanse of snout. It’s so cold! Her internal fire has burned down so low that she can’t maintain her own body heat without the inferno burning in the hearth. A wordless shudder wracks my body, spasming across the mind link I share with the dragons.

Army of Peace whines, twining around Mrs. Ash’s legs. “Hush, little one,” she kneels and strokes his head, then turns to me. “It’s his first time. Root of Purity passed nearly five hundred years before he was hatched.”

I nod. My mother used to tell us stories of the great dragons our ancestors had helped to pass. Root of Purity died suddenly of a disease that snuffed out her internal fire four hundred years before her proper time. My many-greats-grandmother had been too late to sing her passing. Root of Purity’s bones still mark the cliffs of Ashport, her soul still haunts the harbor. That is not a fate the Red Dragon should share.

Dragons only speak to girls. My mother’s voice, even imagined, send needles into my skin. What if she’s right? What if I’m not female enough to do this? I shouldn’t be here. My hands freeze as cold as the Red Dragon’s skin. My throat tightens, too narrow to sing. The clock ticks another minute closer to dawn.

“Dagny,” the Red Dragon speaks, voice almost gone, almost faded. “Sing to me, Dagny.”

I lay my head against the Red Dragon’s, close my eyes. I breathe through the lump in my throat.

I open my mouth, but what are the words? I’ve known the Song of Passage all my life, and now it’s gone, evaporated, an ashen shadow on the wall of a bombed-out building.

“Sing to me, Dagny.”

And the words return. I sing. I push down my mother’s voice. The world starts to swerve away from me, and I follow the careen, letting it carry me, and the Red Dragon with me, on my voice. The hearth and the young dragons and Mr. and Mrs. Ash disappear until I’m alone with the Red Dragon, Born of Dawn.

We lie together on a field of stars. No up, no down, a void of dark and light.

The Red Dragon lifts her head. Eyes bright, reflecting starlight. Warmth radiates from her scales, beneath my hand. She stands and shakes out her wings, stirring a wind that blows my hair back from my face. Her copper scales shine and sparkle with stars.

“Goodbye,” I say.

“Thank you, Dagny.” She flaps her great membranous wings and rises away from me, vanishing into the stars. And the Red Dragon passes beyond life into the Eternal Sky where someday, I too will go.

Returning is hard. My body doesn’t want to accept the weight of the world.

I return to tears, and a room that seems smaller, emptier for the Red Dragon is gone, flown into the Eternal Sky. Dawn lightens the cloud-dark sky, and the first flakes of the storm flutter to the ground.

I smile through my tears. Dragons only talk to girls.

 

* * *

About the Author

Emily Randolph-Epstein was raised by a pack of wild poodles in small-town America. She spent her childhood LARPing, reading fantasy novels, and writing Tamora Pierce fan fiction. She’s known since age eleven that she wanted to be a novelist. After failing most enthusiastically to grow up, she is now a writer and musician living in Perth, Australia with her husband. Her short fiction has appeared in Hybrid Fiction and Infinite Worlds Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @emrandep or check out her blog www.emilyrandolphepstein.com.

Categories: Stories