Without warning, the detective slams Ginny’s face against the table. Stars burst in her eyes and her ears ring. She grunts, mouth half-smashed to the tabletop. Spittle dribbles between her lips.
The detective holds her there by the collar, leans in and whispers, “Don’t get smart. You’ve been arrested enough I don’t need a reason to throw you in the tank overnight. You find your sister and you march her ass in here. You do not want me to find her and Bobby James first.”
Ginny can’t nod, can’t speak until the detective releases her grip and storms out of the room. When the fuzz clears, she notices a business card on the table for Detective Rosa Henneman.
Underneath Ginny, the linoleum floor has spider-webbed with cracks.
“Make it go.” A two-year-old Dakota points her sister toward an acorn. It’s nearly rotten and wedged between an uneven sidewalk. “Make it go, make it go,” Dakota says, bouncing on wobbly legs.
Ginny–nine-years-old and already slouching from the press of the city–crouches next to her sister. She wraps one arm securely around Dakota, hugging her, and cups the acorn in her free hand. It pulses against her palm, tickling a greeting and smelling of sunshine and freedom and warm, wet grass. Ginny tickles back and invites it inside her. Slowly, like sucking a milkshake up a straw, the acorn pulls on her. It starts under her rib cage, lower like a stomach ache, and tugs at things inside her that were never meant to be tugged.
The seed opens, a green shoot budding before their eyes.
“We can plant it here,” Ginny says, leading her sister toward a vacant lot filled with overgrown weeds and car tires. “It’ll grow big, like you, and make acorns of its own. It’ll be part of us. Our secret.”
She digs a hole with her hands. The dry earth darkens, and the soil becomes strong. She sets the acorn inside. Roots take hold, caressing her skin before sliding into the earth. Dirt streaks Ginny’s arms and stains her knees; the touch of it makes her sigh.
But Dakota giggles and dives into the ground, pushing her fingers deep. She digs with fervor until dirt peppers her face, her body. She laughs until the weeds around her wither. Laughs until tears roll down her cheeks and splash the soil like acid rain. Fissures form around her fingertips, like veins leading toward the sapling protected at its heart.
“Make it go,” she says and reaches for the budding oak tree.
Ginny grabs her sister’s hands and pulls her into a careful embrace.
“It’s done,” she whispers and stares at her lonely island of green surrounded by Dakota’s destruction. She inhales the ashen remains of weeds fluttering in the breeze. She stops herself from crying.
“You make everything better,” Dakota says.
But Ginny knows she can’t fix what her sister has wrought.
Stephens offers her a ride home when he sees the bruise along her cheek, the blackening around her eye. He’s pulled a hoodie over his uniform and stuffed his gun and cuffs and police paraphernalia into a backpack slung over his shoulder. Off-duty like this, he looks good, human.
Ginny hesitates, but he insists, and who is she to argue with a cop who’s already arrested her once tonight?
He walks her around back to the fenced-in cop lot. Only a handful of vehicles remain at three a.m., but she knows the bike is his the moment she sees it. All shiny chrome and blue paint job like his eyes. He holds a helmet out to her, and she slips it on.
“Little cold for motorcycles, isn’t it?” she asks.
“I like the outdoors,” he says, mounting the bike and gunning the engine.
She wraps her arms around his waist. “Me, too.”
They arrive at her apartment building and idle awkwardly at the curb. She almost expects to see Dakota passed out against the door again, but it’s as empty as it will be in her basement studio. Only her garden and the sough of crawlers through her bedroom walls to welcome her home.
“You want to come in?” she asks, still clinging to his back.
He tenses. “That would be inappropriate.”
“Yeah,” she says and hops off the bike. She hands him the helmet and meets his gaze. She’s never thought of herself as pretty, but she knows her eyes are dark and deep and sometimes people get lost in them. “You want to come in anyway?”
Stephens stares at her a long moment, then he kills the engine.
She leads him inside, down the narrow stairs to her apartment. It’s one room plus a shower-only bath. The windows are set high, near the ceiling, so it’s always darker and damper and smelling of rain. She doesn’t have a TV or microwave or a real bed, but she does have walls lined with bookshelves and potted plants, a drop-ceiling threaded with hanging vines, and a hydroponic garden that would put a pothead to shame.
“I’m a biologist,” she tells Stephens, more apology than explanation. “Or I want to be.” She frowns. “I’m supposed to graduate in May.”
She rinses a bowl in the kitchen sink, sets it on the counter. From her pocket she removes the clump of dirt–the worm and acorn hiding inside–and puts it in the dish. She takes a scoop of soil from a nearby plant and packs it on top, sprinkling it with water. The worm whispers its pleasure.
Then she turns to Stephens, watches him survey the room with round eyes. He inhales several times, breathing in the thick, heady scent of life. The tension between his shoulders seems to dissolve; his posture relaxes. With a hesitant hand, he traces the bruise on her cheekbone.
“Who are you?” he asks.
Ginny doesn’t answer, just molds her mouth to his and listens to the leaves breathe around them.
The green dress doesn’t fit anymore, so she holds it up to Dakota’s shoulders. The hem kisses the stained carpet.
“It’s beautiful.” Dakota’s black eyes are big and bottomless. She glances at Ginny in the mirror. “Can I keep it?”
Ginny nods. “It’s yours now.”
Dakota squeals and spins. She lifts the dress over her head and shimmies into it. The daisies are long gone, but the fabric remains petal-soft. In love with her own reflection, she doesn’t notice the man stepping out of their mama’s bedroom, but Ginny does. He’s tall and too thin, sunken cheeks and a jaw sharp enough to cut. He reeks of old tobacco and brine.
“Pretty,” the man says, his eyes locked on Ginny.
She’s seen this before, a clarity passing over some grown-up faces when they look at her, as if they’re waking up from a long sleep. They want to touch her then, stroke her hair and kiss her forehead, hold her until they pull on her like the acorn. But she won’t welcome them.
The man approaches the girls. He lays a hand on both their shoulders, but jerks away from Dakota as if burned. Instead, he leans into Ginny, rubbing her back. She tries to move but he fists her hair. She cries out. Dakota growls. The man nuzzles Ginny’s neck, swatting Dakota with the back of his hand. The younger sister flies, smacking the wall with a sickening crunch. When she rises, her shoulder is cocked at an impossible angle and she lurches toward the man with hands outstretched.
Then there are only the man’s screams deafening Ginny’s ears and charred meat filling her nostrils and a brilliant red soaking Dakota’s dress.
In the morning, Ginny leaves Stephens lying on the pillows of her pull-out couch. His nude back glows under a shaft of sunlight spilling in from the uncovered windows. She wants to thank him for making the vines dance and the flowers blossom–for taking only what she gave–but she doesn’t know how to explain the fading of his old football injury or where the silvery scar on his shoulder went or how his tongue tastes like honeysuckle and promises.
She lifts the bowl with her secret buried inside. Overnight the acorn has sprouted. A shoot of green peeks from the soil, and the worm waltzes around its roots. Today everything will change, she knows, and she carries it to the curb.
The bike remains on the street. Crabgrass and morning glories have wrapped between its spoke wheels and tied tight to its handlebars. With a whisper, Ginny draws them back t
o sprawl across the sidewalk like a blanket cushioning the concrete. More greenery grows to join it, and the blanket spreads into the street. Underneath the pavement, roots contort around pipelines and sewer systems; they squeeze and push and punch the surface. They call to her.
She slips Stephens’s keys from her pocket, secures her grip on the bowl with the acorn, and heads toward the Coliseum. Behind her, the exhaust plumes and the blacktop breaks.
The husks of Dakota’s handiwork grow thicker as Ginny approaches the eastside. Blackened buildings dot the landscape, and the January air is ripe with rot and smoke. Plywood-covered windows watch as she parks the motorcycle. The Mississippi Coliseum stands untouched by the decay, a domed structure surrounded by cement. But below it, far down in the depths of the world, she senses the seam between mantle rocks, hears it sigh like a slumbering dragon.
Ginny nestles the plant and bowl in the crook of her elbow. Everything is empty in the dawn, and no one stops her as she touches the main doors. For the first time, she pulls back on the earth, draws the dragon into her, feeds on it as it comes alive under her feet. Wood and iron buckle, bowing inward enough to allow her passage. Her steps shake the walls, rumble supports and braces, shatter glass. It cannot be helped.
The ground trembles.
Inside is all stadium seating and a floor shined in preparation for the next basketball game. The lacquered wood twists and snaps. The noise enfolds her. Her teeth vibrate.
“Figures you’d find me here,” Dakota calls over the chaos. She’s standing opposite the broken entrance, half-obscured by shadow. Her hair has fallen out almost completely, a few strands of black curling over her forehead. Her skin is sallow, one giant green bruise, and peppered with open sores. She limps and coughs and smells of gangrene.
The Coliseum shudders.
“Looks like you’re finally ready.” Dakota says.
“I’ll help you.” Ginny nods. “Please, God, let me help you.”
Dakota comes closer. Wooden bleachers wither in her wake. Her footsteps singe the floor in the shape of her toes. She smiles, revealing ruddy gums. “Bobby said the same thing. You two would’ve liked each other.”
“Where is he?”
Dakota shrugs. “Can’t stand the heat…” She staggers to half-court, kneels and splays her hands on the ground. Her fingers sink in as the flooring disintegrates. Tiny sparks ignite along the edges, and the sick scent of burning plastic fills the air. “I can only get so far,” she says. “You’ll need to open it the rest of the way.”
“And when it’s over?”
Her little sister looks up at her, and for a moment Ginny sees the sixteen-year-old girl inside Dakota. Not the addict or the anarchist or the death goddess, just a scared kid in a green dress.
“We’ll start again.” Hope shines in Dakota’s endless eyes. “We can build whatever we want, be whoever we want.”
Holding the potted plant close to her side, Ginny nods. “All right.”
Sirens sound over the cacophony of splitting timbers and shredding steel. Distantly, a voice she recognizes shouts through a megaphone, but she ignores whatever it’s saying.
Ginny reaches down and wakes the dragon.
“That’s fucking stupid.” Dakota’s small breasts push against the tabletop as she bends to snort the white line. “Why would you build something on a fucking volcano?”
“It’s extinct,” Ginny says, pointing at the textbook propped over her thighs. “Has been forever.”
Dakota squints and leans her head back. “But one time?”
“Long ago, I guess it was active.”
Her sister smiles, a sly, lop-sided thing that is part childish, part devil. Her eyes glaze over and blood from her nose fills the indent of her upper lip. “Bet you could make it work.”
“Dunno. And if I could, I wouldn’t. The whole city might burn.”
Dakota takes her hand, squeezes it. “Nothing but steel and sinners. The city did this to us, Ginny. Imagine what you could grow if you started fresh?”
The pull is an easy, lazy tug on her heart. Ginny’s fingers start to ache; her knuckles flake and crack. But in her grasp, Dakota’s wrinkled skin turns rich and dark and lovely.
Tectonic plates shift and shudder. The hot, slow flow of magma begins to bubble and writhe. Ginny delves into the earth, feels its rhythmic rumble. She opens herself to its pull, feels it snake inside her stomach, coil around her lungs. She gasps.
“Like that.” Dakota clasps Ginny’s hand. Energy rushes like wildfire from the earth’s core, between them, through them. Uncontrolled and unfathomable. Dakota’s hair grows in first, then her teeth. Her skin glows with health, and her eyes sparkle with unshed tears.
Ginny ages a dozen years.
Chunks of debris rain around them, crashing like waves against mountains. The ground opens where Ginny wills, a pit descending into shadow and fire. Her muscles burn and the bones in her legs snap. She cries out from the force of it, the swirl of life and pain and power.
Then Stephens appears beyond a collapsed wall. He’s calling her name and he’s still in his hoodie and does he have to look at her like that? Beside him, Detective Rosa Henneman raises her gun.
“No,” is all Ginny can mumble as the bullet flies. She doesn’t even hear the gunshot over the storm, but she sees it pierce Dakota’s back and exit her breast. It nicks Ginny’s bicep, and her secret–the tiny pot of dirt and worm and acorn–tumbles to the shattered floor.
For a moment, Dakota seems surprised, unaware that she’s injured, then her smile droops and she slumps unmoving to Ginny’s lap.
The scream that tears from Ginny’s mouth is all fury and thunder, rippling the earth for miles. She clutches Dakota to her chest and buries her face in her sister’s hair.
“I know it’s not how you wanted,” she murmurs, “but we’re gonna start fresh.”
Cradling Dakota against her, Ginny gathers her acorn. The worm says it’s ready. She tosses it slow, like rolling dice, into the hole she’s created. Then she welcomes the dragon’s pull, feeds it everything that is left for her to give.
It begins quietly. The dust settles; the fire dies. Roots take hold and a tree grows. It springs from the earth and pushes toward the sun. A thick web of grass and bluebells and morning glories spreads outward, cloaking the city in a green gown. The verdure knits itself across concrete and over cars. It scales skyscrapers and fills factories. It cannot be stopped.
In the center of it is an oak tree that towers above all. Two trunks twine together at the base, but only one reaches toward a blue, blue sky.
Born and still based in Ohio, Stephanie Lorée writes fantasy fiction and occasionally moonlights as a rock star. Her stories have appeared in such places as Abyss & Apex and as tie-in fiction for the Pathfinder RPG. With her editor hat on, Stephanie freelances for indie authors and small presses. She loves gaming, good sushi, and bad kung fu flicks. Stay up to date at her website: stephanieloree.com
“Ginny and the Ouroboros” was originally published in Urban Fantasy Magazine in 2014.
LAURA VANARENDONK BAUGH
RED IN TOOTH AND MAW
The footage was grainy and muted; they had cheaped out on the trail cams. Dr. Jessi Kemuel thought that was a mistake, as spectacular footage would be a real boost to capital, but the argument was they didn’t have the funds to buy cameras to raise funds.
Dragon conservation should have been a shoo-in for public support, but it seemed information overload and queasy politics had rendered everyone jaded these days.
Regardless, the imperfect scene on the conference room screen showed clearly enough the enormous beast pausing from dissecting a moose to shake its head repeatedly, as if dislodging something from its ear, and pawing at its snout. It was difficult to tell on the pixelated image, but Jessi thought the scales on the side of the jaw showed wear.
“It’s not going away.” Jackson didn’t sound happy about it.
Beside Jes
si, Dr. Lackland sat back in his chair and scowled. “We can’t dope another dragon. If it goes wrong again—the population can’t afford it, the Foundation can’t afford it.”
“We all know the stakes,” Dr. Freeman said, waving her hand. “But we can’t afford to lose another specimen, and especially not through neglect, which it will certainly be called. You think funding is a problem if an animal dies during treatment? Try having one die for lack of treatment—again.”
“And kiss that future accreditation goodbye,” Lackland added. “The world’s only dragon reserve fails to meet minimum standard care? There’ll be ‘Free the Dragons!’ protests everywhere and we’ll be scraping change off the metro floor.”
“There are no published standards of care for a barely recognized species,” Jackson muttered. “And the dragons are already free, just protected.”
“You want to explain that to the public? Because I’ve tried, and the nuances just don’t get through.”
Jessi didn’t enter the grumbling debate. It was an old argument over old territory; they returned to it only because it was familiar and therefore safer than the looming threat of losing another dragon.
Three months ago, their fledgling reserve had made headlines when one of their five known residents dropped dead. Now they had a second showing similar symptoms, a bad situation for both a critically endangered species and their mission.
Jessi’s stomach sank as three pairs of eyes turned on her. “You’re awfully quiet,” Jackson observed. “What do you suggest?”
Jessi drew a slow breath, as if delay would help. “We could try cooperative care.”
Lackland’s eye roll was audible. “Not this again.”
“There are so many reasons it won’t work,” Pamela Freeman said, lifting an explanatory finger. “Time, for one. If that dragon’s in danger, we don’t have time to teach it to open wide while someone crams a thermometer into the opposite end.”
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