The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  Frozen, Rhea stares up into the twister and waits for it to gobble her whole, blankets, bathtub, and all.

  “Why?”

  She doesn't know why she says it. It just comes without a thought, the last thing she'll probably ever whisper swallowed up in the fury of a tornado.

  For a moment everything stops. The tornado's voice grows still. All the little chunks of trash hang frozen in the air, like someone's just hit the pause button. Rhea can see flowering shrubs and someone's shoe, a lawn gnome and two china cups. Then, just as suddenly, it all comes tumbling down. As quickly as it arrived the storm moves on, grumbling deep down in its throat.

  Rhea's life never quite stops being weird after that.

  When she's eleven, there is a Valentine's party held at her school. All the kids give each other chocolates and paper hearts, little notes of affection or humor or goodwill. Rhea gets nothing in her cubby hole and spends recess crying beneath the slides, a splotchy-faced outcast with too-big glasses and scuffed secondhand sneakers. She tells herself she doesn't care, but it still stings.

  The storm blows in later that evening. Much to the delight of the students, the only thing it destroys is the middle school. Rhea wakes the morning after to find the front yard strewn with paper hearts, drifting gently down from the sky in a fluttering pink and red cloud.

  On the night of her senior prom, a wedge tornado rips apart the gym where the dance is taking place. Rhea isn't there at the time. She's at home studying for a calculus exam, and only realizes something has happened when the Prom Queen's crown and bouquet of roses bang against the front door in quick succession. Later, it's a tricky affair to explain why she has these things. People give her funny looks when she swears they just appeared from the sky.

  A wall cloud, the same vivid green as her graduation gown, keeps pace with her car on a seventy-five-mile long interstate jaunt to visit a friend up north. She keeps a wary eye on it as it skips across the distant plains, frisking along in her driver's side window like the happiest, most destructive puppy in the world. It's a strangely beautiful, perversely joyous thing. Rhea doesn't notice the smile creeping across her lips until she goes to check her lipstick in the mirror. For the rest of the journey she broods with the radio cranked up, wondering what the hell is up with her brain lately.

  She begs her parents to move to Greenland or Finland or anywhere else, preferably somewhere cold with no rapid temperature shifts between air masses. They laugh and go right on living where their parents and grandparents settled before them, as rooted to the local soil as the big pecan trees the storms occasionally blow over. Folks like them don't up and leave because of a puny twister or twelve. They're used to it, or so they say.

  Rhea begins dating an out-of-towner. She's making her escape plans before he even produces a ring.

  The wedding was going so well up until this point, too.

  Glasses and forks and bits of broken plates and cake lay strewn across the grass of the lakeside hill, a breadcrumb trail leading back to the lodge where guests huddle inside like a frightened covey of quail. One of the tables — the bench that previously held the catered macaroni and cheese, three different kinds of champagne, and the groom's favorite brand of potato chip — has turned turtle, legs sticking up at a crazy, immodest angle from the skirt of its paper covering. The wedding gifts sit deserted in a pyramid heap, already listing precariously in the wind.

  The funnel in the sky overhead is a lacy confection of a thing, as delicately knit as anything Rhea, standing far beneath it, might be wearing. Her veil whips in the breeze. Both fists are balled at her sides, nails digging crescent moons into the flesh of her palms. Blood spots her bitten lip, and her expensive bridal coif is coming down around her ears.

  Rhea has had it up to here with the friggin' tornadoes.

  It must be the same one. The rudeness of its behavior combined with every other incident it has been responsible for in her life has pushed Rhea into a confrontation she's pretty sure will either result in her death, her commitment to a psychiatric ward, or her further instatement into family gossip for the next twenty years. She can feel eyes watching her from the windows of the lodge, cousins twice removed and great aunties wondering what crazy thing she'll do next. Fighting the urge to flip them all a glorious two-handed bird, she keeps her attention fully focused on the swirl of cloud above, determined to hash this out or die trying.

  “What the hell do you mean by this? What gives you the fucking right?” She's yelling at the top of her lungs, trying to be heard over the noise of the storm. The downdraft keeps shoving her words back down her throat like used party napkins, which makes her even madder. “Obviously you don't want to kill me, Christ knows you've had enough chances to do that, so what exactly is it you want? Blood? A business partner?”

  The wind tosses a rose from one of the bouquets into her chest. She looks down at it, mind doing all kinds of weird mental gymnastics. Valentines. Rose petals. The way it follows her everywhere like a smitten crush. Smitten? Oh, no. Hell no. A hysterical laugh bubbles up from deep inside. The psych ward it is, then. Napoleon, the guy who thinks he's a cheese cruller, and the girl who believes a tornado is in love with her. Come one, come all. They don't get crazier than this.

  “Really?” she says. “Really? No, I'm sorry. You're a tornado. You don't get to fall in love. Do you even know what love means? You destroy cities. You've messed with my life; you even screwed up my wedding. All I want is to be normal. Do you know what normal is? It's NOT BEING CHASED BY FUCKING TORNADOS. Just leave me the hell alone, okay? Go do whatever it is tornados do. Please.”

  The air stills. Rhea braces herself for the fury of a jilted twister, imagining the authorities hauling her down from an oak branch in some town fifty miles distant. When nothing happens, she opens her eyes again to find the cloudbank dissipating, shreds of fluffy vapor unraveling like an old knit cap. All the tension goes out of her and she drops to her knees, suddenly, achingly exhausted.

  When she enters the lodge the guests part nervously before her. She brushes past them until she finds her fiancé, Rick, as blonde and blandly handsome as a sunny day. He grabs her as she slumps. Strong arms. Stable arms. That's all Rhea wants right now.

  “Take me somewhere normal,” she says into his chest. “I want to do what normal people do.”

  They move to Southern California, where the biggest threat is the ground buckling beneath your feet. Rhea can handle earthquakes. They don't have personalities, or shapes, or strange unearthly voices. A big one can destroy your home, true, but compared to the sheer presence of a tornado they seem benign by comparison, just a thing that occasionally happens.

  Rick buys them a pretty little house on a pretty little suburban street, complete with a dog in the yard and a rosebush beneath the kitchen window. The grass here is always green, the temperature always perfect. She doesn't have to work — that's taken care of, too — and there's always an endless stream of cheerful, attentive neighbors passing through, ready to lend a helping hand. They go to their jobs in the morning like a flock of starlings and come straight home to roost at night beneath cloudless, starry skies. When there are storms, they're short-lived and weak, blown apart by the coastal winds before they can even get a good hail going. It's safe. For the first time in her life, Rhea doesn't find herself worrying when dark clouds crowd the horizon. She worries about bills instead, or taxes, or dieting.

  For two years they live like this, in the happy, insular world Rick has created for them. Relatives come to visit from the Midwest and tell her how lucky she is. Girl Scouts sell cookies door-to-door, leaving their bikes by the road when dinnertime calls them inside. Every day is exactly the same. Slowly, the newness begins to wear off like the shine from a penny. Rhea's smile becomes fixed and strained on her face, seams showing beneath the tan.

  She has it made, but she's not happy. Not even close.

  Her husband isn't the problem, not quite. He's handsome and cheerful, kind to a fault and
considerate to embarrassment. If you need a kitten down from a tree, a granny helped across a street, or any combination of the two, Rick's your fella. Rhea resents her own feelings more than she does him, but there's nothing she can do about them. Too late she begins to realize that this is not what she wants, has never been what she wants. Sodium lamps and weather without weather and sprinklers that come on at 9 PM every night. Eerily identical houses on eerily identical streets, rows and rows and rows of them swallowing up the horizon.

  Rhea closes her eyes beneath 600 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and dreams of tornadoes.

  Sometimes there's a man-shape inside, with hazel eyes and a halo of black hair. Sometimes the figure is a woman. This much is always the same: they look at her with sadness and something like pity and then turn away, the hurt plain across their faces, bare skin rippling back to cloud before Rhea can take three steps forward. She wakes with a barb of longing in her chest and carries it with her all through her bland, sunny day.

  She doesn't miss tornadoes; that's not it at all. That would be silly. The excitement they represent? Maybe a little. But not the storms themselves, and certainly not her storm. You can't fall in love with destruction. What would that say about a person?

  Rhea is twenty-two years old, and she's burning out on life so quickly it's like she's been dunked in gasoline. One day it gets to be too much. She throws all the clothes she can into a hiker's backpack and drives back east until she hits the plains. She stops at the first city with a good university and a better meteorology program.

  Dear Rick, the letter she leaves him on the kitchen counter begins. I'm broken. I've gone to find other broken things. Don't wait up.

  The black van bounces and jostles through the grass like a string of cans behind a newlywed sedan, hitting every dip it comes to with a joyful (and to Rhea's aching backside, malicious) rattle. The “road” they're following is little more than a twin set of ruts in the dirt, one of those little cattle paths ranchers use to feed and check up on their livestock. They fly along it like it's the Autobahn, white satellite hoisted sail-fashion atop the roof and a spume of dust curling from beneath the balding wheels.

  Cave drives, goateed and tattooed and awake only by the grace of God knows what substance. Studious, buttoned-up Kelly, looking like a wet-behind-the-ears college professor crossed with a traffic cop, mans the GPS and the recording equipment, hissing gently each time the van sends him rocketing towards the yellowing ceiling. Rhea is in charge of radar duty. The screen in front of her is awash with ugly green and red splotches, like time-lapse footage of the worst case of chicken pox ever. The storms developed suddenly, maybe around 2 or so, and have been holding a course for the northeast ever since. If the oracles at the National Weather Service are correct, the biggest cell will be crossing their path within the next ten minutes. Her fellow chasers and meteorology students are already making plans for data and video and all the other things you jot down when a big tornado comes your way, chattering to one another over the radios in excited jargon that sounds more like starship navigation than weather detection.

  Rhea has her own plans, but she keeps tight-lipped. She thinks of Rick getting a late-night phone call somewhere in San Diego. She thinks of her family, sisters and grandparents and cousins all whispering in hushed, solemn tones around piles of green bean casserole and fried chicken. Such a shame, they'd say, shaking their heads. Poor girl lost her marbles when she left her husband; it was only a matter of time before something bad happened. Storm-chasing, of all the careers, and after all the trouble she went through as a little girl.

  Cave shouts a warning from up front and slams on the brakes abruptly, sending papers and equipment and people flying. Rhea careens off the walls like a cricket in a mason jar and lands ass-over-teakettle in a tangled heap on the floor, laptop still miraculously clutched in one hand. She's back on her feet before the engine can start to creak and cool, clambering over the front seats to check on Cave. Kelly groans and swears a blue streak behind her, half-buried beneath an avalanche of printer paper.

  His fingers are clenched around the steering wheel when she makes it to the front, face blanched beneath the tattoos. He says nothing at all, simply points to the horizon through the cracked windshield. The radio roars with static and sirens and garbled voices.

  “Fuck,” he finally whispers.

  It's a solid mass of churning black, stretching from one side of the sky to the other. Gray tentacles snake from its bulk. The wall cloud above spirals like an out-of-control galaxy dragged helplessly along and around. Grass billows and ripples before it, turned a shade of sickly technicolor green by the dying light. From this distance it looks like it's moving in slow motion, twirling towards them in ponderous silence. The van rocking in the wind is the only reminder that yes, the view through the glass is real. Not a newsreel, not a movie screen. The biggest tornado Rhea's ever seen in a life full of them, five miles wide and dense as a black hole.

  Looking for her. Just as she's been looking for it.

  She doesn't stop to think, doesn't let herself think. She simply acts, dropping the laptop, vaulting across the van and over Kelly and through the back doors so quickly nobody even tries to grab her until it's too late. The wind sucks her outside in an explosion of data papers and noise. If the others shout at her to come back, she can't hear it over the boom and shriek of the oncoming storm.

  Rhea runs towards her tornado. It's hard going, wading through the alfalfa and timothy and goatweed, but it's coming to meet her, too, and every gust pulls her closer and closer. The world fades from green to deep purple. Debris begins to land around her, shingles and railroad ties and trees and a crumpled Radio Flyer stripped of all its paint. She wonders if she'll be crushed or impaled before she reaches the thing's outer limits, decides she doesn't care, and keeps moving, almost lifted off her feet by the force of the gale. Can it sense her down here, a tiny speck in the grass? More importantly, will it be happy to see her after last time? What if it's still disappointed?

  She gets as close as she dares and cups her hands to her mouth. Fat lot of good that'll do.

  “I came back!” she yells. “I've been tracing your cell patterns for years now, do you know that?”

  There's a lull in the storm. Rhea can hear the blood pounding in her ears, louder than thunder. Her throat is scratchy and hoarse from flying dirt in the air, but she keeps talking anyway.

  “Those things I said at the wedding… I'm sorry. I was pretty fucked up back then. I didn't really mean them, swear to God.” Rain splatters onto her face and trickles down her cheeks. The pressure changes in her ears are excruciating. “I think I want to go with you. If you don't want me anymore, that's okay, but I had to find out. Just in case you did.”

  The tornado's spin slows. For a moment she thinks it's turning away, and her heart sinks. Then it bears down on her, five miles of chaos and movement and change. Rhea smiles like a lightning slash, opening her arms to take it all in.

  “Take me some place interesting,” she whispers.

  And it does.

  Sun Dogs

  Floating through endless night in a tiny silver ball, surrounded by noise and confusion and the overpowering scents of metal and her own push-stink, the dog Laika dreams.

  Snow crunches under the pads of her feet, biting at them with tiny unseen fangs. She is running with a pack of others through the cold and the city-smell, claws skittering on slippery hard water. They are all shaggy and long-toothed and their breath makes little clouds in the air. Frost grows a fur coat over Brother's whiskers and nose, like a pup's first layer of down. The cat they are pursuing is just strides ahead, a leap and a shake away from being warm meat between Laika's jaws, when people appear at the mouth of the alleyway holding nooses and sticks.

  In the real world, the catch-men had taken everything. In dreams, they are fooled as easily as rabbits. Laika is a smart dog. She grows brown-and-white wings, like a pigeon or a seagull. The other members of her pack follow —�
�Brother's feathers are as black and tangled as the rest of him — and together they fly away, leaving the catch-men empty-handed far below. The cool air lifts Laika up and up. She can smell garbage and fish-gutting places and the sting of salty water, all the wonderful reeks of home. Cat water-stink. The less pleasant odors of tar-coated poles and burning dead things, harsh enough to dull the best nose. They all go to a park with grass and trees and lots of cat push-stink to roll in. The puddles here aren't hard. Laika drinks until her stomach sloshes and water dribbles from the corners of her mouth.

  She wakes from the dream needing to make water-stink herself and whines softly when she realizes where she is. The padded ball is her den now, and everything inside her whispers that making stink in one's den is not a thing smart dogs do. But eventually she has to. Nothing else remains. The world through the window is black and empty, marked with tiny faraway gleams that might be the eyes of unknown animals. All the trees and grasses and even the whitecoats have long since vanished in a blur of heat and tumbling, fearful movement.

  There's a rubber bag strapped to her hind end, a net of harnesses holding her tightly in place, and a feeling of floating that never disappears no matter how many times she scrabbles at the floor for purchase. It makes her dizzy and sick. Beneath the straps her skin itches, so warm and close it feels like it might split open. She cannot turn around or even circle to make a proper bed.

  Laika re-adjusts herself as best she can, closes her eyes, and wishes for brown-and-white wings.

  There is no trusting the ball and no understanding it, no more than one can understand the intentions of a whitecoat. Like them, it is neither good nor bad. It emits a constant howl, dispenses food slime, and shakes so terrifyingly that Laika trembles and makes water-stink without thinking. She would curl into a tiny invisible ball if she could, but the chains and the harness hold her in place. All she can do is bark to let the panic out, over and over until her throat hurts and the metal walls echo like she is many.