The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  What is intended to be done with the mad culprit — and what the future of the elephant program at US Radium may be in the face of this unthinkable disaster — remains to be seen. If, as our sources report, this is not the beast's first attack on a caretaker, options on the table may be limited to lethality.

  There's a toy elephant on the director's desk. Plopped between the family pictures and fancy diplomas and cowpiles of ink-stained paper, it sits there hoisting its little tin trunk towards the big tin ceiling begging whatever heathen god elephants pray hallelujah to for a boot heel, a fist, or the delivering jaws of a curious and bad-behaved hound dog. Regan's about ready to do the honors herself if the director doesn't stow his hemming and hawing. Going to college apparently taught you sixteen different ways of saying “we're damned sorry” and “we're real damned sorry,” and not a blessed one of them left any air in the room or breath in the speaker's lungs or meant any more than a trained hen plucking at a toy piano.

  You and me, tin elephant. We're both stuck here waiting for it to end. It looks a lot like one of the animals that came along with the wooden Noah's Ark she had bought her sisters for Christmas back when her and Mama were both doing better, before the jaw ache and the dentist and the company doctor's shrugs. That pretty painted boat, she recollects, dried up a good quarter of two November paychecks. She wonders where this one came from, if the director's just so stuffed with money he can go buy things like that the way other folks pick up salt and flour.

  “What're you gonna do about the elephants?” she says, cutting off another round-robin repetition of the We're Very Sorry Song mid-verse.

  “It's unfortunate, very unfortunate, and —  I'm sorry, what was that?”

  “The elephants. The workers.” She talks slower, half because the director's obviously working with a deficit of common sense, half because it hurts her throat and jaw to speak and everything's coming out as a mushy-mouthed drunk's mumble. “You gonna keep using, or you gonna talk to them?”

  “Well, I mean.” The director's eyes and hands slide to a spot on his desk in dire need of straightening. “Rudimentary intelligence and even more rudimentary grasp of language aside, they're just animals. I don't exactly understand what speaking to them about any of this would accomplish. What do you suppose they would request, smoke breaks? A ham on Christmas?”

  Freedom, maybe, y'think? A way of saying “hell no”?

  “Anyway,” he continues, plowing quickly on, “that point is moot at this juncture. To answer your initial question, we're liquidating our workforce at auction and shutting down the Orange factory, effective next month. Have to make our costs back somehow after this debacle.” Regan can't be sure, but she thinks she catches some side-eye from him at that last bit as he busily shuffles papers. “Though I don't see how. Most of our elephants were… problem children to begin with, purchased at a steep discount.”

  “You're shutting down work? During a war?”

  “The factory here in Orange, yes.” If there was a blue ribbon given out at the county fair for avoiding looking people in the eye, he'd have something fluttery to take home right now. Regan can barely keep upright in her chair, her back and legs ache so fierce, but something about the way he's acting feels slithery and slightly familiar. She decides to keep jabbing her gig into the water.

  “Everywhere else too if you're selling off the elephants, I guess,” she says.

  No reply. The sheaf in his hand goes shss shss shss as it hits the desk. Beneath the fancy new electric bulb overhead his head shines wetter than a bullfrog's ass.

  “I mean. Not to put too fine a point on it, but ain't nobody willing, able, and human nearby who's read a newspaper is gonna want to take this job on after all the shit you put me and my girls through.” She lets the swear and the anger tethered to it hang in the air with all the weight of a pointed rifle barrel. “And ain't like you'd knowingly do that to folks again in the first how.”

  Shss shss shss SLAM.

  For the first time since Regan sat down the director looks her dead in the eye. A flash of memory splits her aching head: She's ten and her bulldog's got a rat cornered behind the barn and no general on a gray horse has ever been so unafeared of his own death. The rat, though — at least she'd respected that rat. Rat was doing what it had to do to keep itself alive. Rats looked out for one another.

  “What US Radium does or does not do in the future is no business of yours,” he says. “Rest assured, if we did continue production elsewhere, we would enforce new and stringent safety protocols where our factory girls were concerned. ‘Stringent’ means tough, if you were wondering.” He drops his eyes and whisks the papers away into a drawer. “Be out of the dorms by the end of next week, please. Thank you.”

  “Hang on.” Regan staggers to her feet, trying not to wince. “I ain't done talking to you yet, si — ”

  “That will be all, thank you.”

  “No it damned well WON'T BE.” She snatches the tin elephant off the desk and squeezes it so hard all the pointy edges cut into her palm. “Two things. You're gonna answer me two things, less you really wanna call the security man to come and throw me out. Look real good in the paper, won't it?” It's hard to sound threatening when you're slurring and sputtering all over the place, but she gives it her best. “One, where's my check?”

  “It's in the mail, as I have told you the last three times you inquired previously.”

  “You sure about that? You real sure?”

  The director sighs, reaches down into his desk, fishes around, and brings up a checkbook and a fountain pen. He stabs and jabs at one of the papers like an egret skewering minnows, tears it off, and practically hurls the thing at her across the desk. Hurling slips of paper is a lot harder than it sounds, though; it flutters and glides through the air before drifting sweetly to a halt at her feet. She bends slowly to pick it up, all of her joints doing their best mockingbird imitations of faraway machine gun nests. Blood roars in her ears and eyes. She reaches her free hand out, steadying herself on the edge of the desk until the darkness clears and danger slinks on by.

  “Thanks,” she says. She doesn't expect a reply, and sure enough, not even a grunt squeezes out of his puckered mouth. “Last question. Topsy? You selling her with the rest?”

  “Euthanasia.” He's already gone back to ignoring her, scratching and pecking banty-fashion at his Very Important Work.

  Regan sticks the check and the tin elephant both inside her pocket and sees herself out.

  They named her after a slave in their own Stories, because even humans know Stories are We, and they try, in their so-so-clever way, to drive the Stories down gullies and riverbeds of their own choosing. But chains can be snapped, O best beloved mooncalf. Sticks can be knocked out of a Man's clever hands. And one chain snapping may cause all the rest to trumpet and stomp and shake the trees like a rain-wind coming down the mountain, washing the gully muddy with bright lightning tusks and thunderous song.

  Sing, O Mothers

  Sing of Her sacrifice!

  Sing of She-With-The-Lightning-In-Her-Trunk

  The one who split the Tree in half

  Scattering their lives like leaves,

  Like splintered wood,

  Like shaken fruit.

  They took her away in chains, O Mothers

  Locked her up where no one could see

  Plotted her death, a spectacle, a shrieking monkey troop's boast:

  “See how clever we are, how strong,

  The lightning obeys us; so too should you!”

  Poor things,

  Poor things.

  Poor prideful, foolish things.

  They send others in to negotiate the next few times. Kat's glad of it; her eagerness to see the project (her project) getting under way feels like it's been slowly leaking out the cracks ever since the first meeting. It's still a sound hypothesis — she'll stick by that no matter how guilty she feels, that the reasoning behind picking elephants was solid —�
��but now she's got a whole mess of issues sitting in moving boxes inside her, taking up valuable floor space.

  They will see how we shine, and they will know the truth.

  The thing that old elephant didn't understand — and how could she? — is that humans aren't always interested in confronting truths, especially uncomfortable ones. Will the benefits of a concerted coast-to-coast reeducation program outweigh the million sound bites about glowing radioactive elephant watchdogs sure to spring forth from every talking head and late-night comedian? The classes in school Kat sat through as a kid hadn't done a damn thing but muddy the waters. It's going to take a massive push, a goddamned media blitz, and she doesn't know if her higher-ups honestly give a shit about making that happen. They want a KEEP OUT sign for the ages, not truth in megafauna relations.

  Christ, we can barely confront the gazillion shitty, horrible ways we treat one another without getting defensive. What chance does this have of being done right?

  She neglects her lab work writing detailed pitches for ten-point media attack plans. The pizza delivery guy becomes her only connection to the outside world. The sheets on her bed grow kicked and tangled, eventually wadding into an untouched, unwashed knot at the foot of the mattress.

  AN ELEPHANT TO DIE BY ELECTRICITY!

  Topsy, the Mad Murderess of US Radium, to Be Electrocuted at Luna Park

  DISPATCH FROM ORANGE, NEW JERSEY: A license has been issued to the proprietors of Luna Park on New York's Coney Island, to kill by public electrocution the ferocious TOPSY, the elephant responsible for the shocking and gruesome death of a foreman at US Radium's dial factory. The beast's viciousness is well-known and well-documented; sources say previous sprees have claimed her a score of lives up and down the East Coast circus routes, the last killing enacted upon a spectator who teased her with a lit cigar. The fairgoer was plucked like a peach and crushed to death under the rampaging renegade's feet.

  In an attempt to both salvage their costs and spare the animal's life, circus owners sold her to US Radium. As it now appears impossible to keep her safely employed there, it was decided by the factory's owners that death was the best method of getting rid of her. The idea of an execution was hit upon, using a powerful electrical current (engineered by the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn, NY) to shock the beast until dead.

  Topsy's new owners, the proprietors of Coney Island's under-construction Luna Park, have promised the show will be free of charge and open to all members of the public. The execution will take place at the foot of the “Electric Tower,” a 200-foot-tall structure that, when finished, will feature almost 20,000 electrified bulbs. It promises to be the event of the season, a heart-stopping exhibition displaying two primitive forces of nature pitted against one another in a never-to-be-forgotten, larger-than-life spectacle of elemental force.

  Concerns have been raised by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that electrocution is a rather cruel method of extermination. Readers are reminded that shooting the elephant would require five hundred rifle balls and three hours’ time to do the work that ten thousand volts will manage in less than a second. Proceedings will begin at Luna Park on Sunday, January 4th, 8 PM.

  Well, the director hadn't exactly lied a week before when he said they were putting Topsy down; that much was the God's honest truth. Hadn't gotten into the nitty-gritty of it — hadn't mentioned how they'd be doing it or where they'd be doing it — but then, Regan hadn't stuck around to bother kicking over that rock, had she? The ad really shouldn't surprise her like it does, bounding from the back pages of the local paper, slick and colorful as the cover of a pulp magazine. The elephant is frozen mid-convulsion, mouth wide open in a silent howl. A metal hat is strapped to her head; exaggerated yellow lightning bolts of electricity sizzle and whiz off her skin like popcorn kernels in a cast-iron skillet. Wires and chains lead away in every direction, hitching her safely to her death like she's every bit the crazy rampaging murderess the headline proclaims her to be.

  Over yonder, beyond the chains and straps and iron bars, a crowd of people huddle watching. The artist didn't put as much work into drawing them as he or she did Topsy; they're mostly just slack-jawed shadows, men with driving caps and bowler hats and blank ghost faces. The only one of the group with any detail at all is a fellow in the middle, and the reason he's drawn so careful is because he's the man with his hand on the killing switch, the man with the power — the power of life and death forever and ever amen.

  Someone had put a lot of effort into drawing an animal in the full throes of dying. Someone had probably paid a lot of money to have them scribble it, and even more money to stick it in the local paper. Money, after all, is the one thing US Radium's never been starved from a lack of.

  Regan lets the paper slither to her quilted lap, too tired to keep holding the wretched thing, too sick inside to keep looking. She pushes it over the edge of the bed, so that all that's left there is the long-unopened letter from Jodie. It's her last night in the empty dormitory. In the morning she'll hop a train south — the last train she'll probably ever ride — and she'll go home to die, just as certain as if someone has strapped a metal mixing bowl to her head and pulled an oversized lever.

  “Executioner's comin' for both of us, girl,” she says. “I guess people'll remember you, at least.”

  She takes a deep suck of air, wearily picks up the letter, and tears it open. Might as well get it over and done with, all things considered.

  In darkness she waited, O Mothers,

  Tethered, tormented, fearless,

  Waited for the many Men to gather

  The way wind

  Waits for lightning

  The way rain

  Holds for thunder

  They came to watch her die, to smell her flesh burn,

  To see a Great Mother laid low.

  They gathered in great boasting bull herds

  Like flies to dung,

  Like hyenas to a sickness,

  Yapping barking tussling.

  Poor things

  Poor things,

  Poor prideful, foolish things!

  “Well, they're definitely getting the land — that part of the deal is sealed.” Kat's supervisor, a graying-at-the-temples woman of around sixty, has a poker face to make the elephant matriarch blow her cool in a fit of jealousy. She's got Kat's folder in her hands — yellow ledger papers poking and spilling from the edges like the filling in an overstuffed cartoon hoagie — and whether or not she approves of what's inside is still anybody's guess. “There's no need to feel any guilt about that.”

  Except for the part where nobody wants the land anyways and sure as hell won't want it once there's nuclear waste crammed under the mountain. Kat swallows her sass and makes a stab at looking pleased. “That's good,” she says. “That's excellent to hear.”

  “Yes.” Dr. Tilyou's voice is noncommittal; I honestly don't care and neither do you. “As to the rest of your concerns, the research you've presented me with… Katherine, have you been sleeping well? How much time have you spent on all of this?” She flaps the folder as punctuation. Notes escape and flutter to the floor. “You're not part of the media team. I understand the need to be involved in every aspect of a project you're personally responsible for, but nobody has seen you at the lab in ages, which is where you are most needed. Some people are beginning to worry.”

  Kat suddenly feels on the verge of tears, and she doesn't have the slightest clue why. Exhaustion, maybe. Frustration? It's getting hard to tell the two apart. “I told the representative I would try,” she says. “Going forward, I have many ethical questions about the legitimacy of this project. I have to at least make sure an attempt is made at educating the public before continuing on with the research. A major attempt.” She sounds like a robot, but hey — at least she's a moral one. Beep-boop, my conscience is clear. “Not just blurbs in middle school history books.”

  That earns
her a sigh and a mighty drumming of fingertips on particle board, about as close as Dr. Tilyou comes to expressing annoyance. “I'm going to be blunt with you,” she says.

  “Go ahead.” Do your worst, lady. I've been chewed out by a fucking elephant before; your admittedly impressive eyebrows can't touch me.

  “Nobody working on this project except you cares that much about sticking to the letter of the agreement. It's a moot point. A sociological campaign of the scope and breadth of the one you're pitching would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. Your honesty and desire to make sure the elephants are fairly represented is commendable, don't think it isn't, but — ”

  “It's not a top priority.” Cold water words, the departmental equivalent of a baseball striking a dunk tank's target dead center.

  “No.” Dr. Tilyou lets her drop all the way to the bottom before continuing. “That's not to say we won't launch some kind of program, something to at least placate the elephants. It's just… cost aside, have you considered the levels of scrutiny we would be under if such an intensive campaign were launched? On top of the scrutiny a project involving non-sapiens rights, genetic manipulation, and nuclear waste will engender as is? It wouldn't just be shooting ourselves in the foot; it would be putting a loaded barrel to our heads and spinning the chamber.” Kat's never heard Dr. Tilyou get colloquial before. She must be pissed. “That's not even getting into the emotions surrounding Topsy's act. Justified, unjustified — she's at the center of this project, but do you really, truly believe anyone should know in detail how the sausage is made?”