Hollow Kingdom

by Kira Jane Buxton

  Dennis whined—a high-pitched plea to stop me from barging ahead in typical, valiant, S.T. fashion. I gave him a sharp nod of reassurance, hopped up to one of the doors, and flapped through the missing glass. I perched on an ornate brass light fixture. King Street Station had retained much of the beauty in its bones: its carved, coffered ceiling, the shine of marble walls, the wood benches for MoFos to sit on and wait for the train’s shriek. But there were some notable differences since I was last here, meeting Tiffany S. from Tinder. For starters, there was what was left of a MoFo—a torso in a fluorescent yellow and orange jacket—squirming on the ground next to the Tickets and Information counter like a halved worm. The smell of recent death and fear pheromones dangled in the air, heavy as ripe fruit, and I quickly realized that the place was speckled with bones. A femur. A mandible. A smaller other leg bone—admittedly, my anatomy identification could use some work. A sticky meat-log with legs lay near a discarded backpack. I gasped at the grisly scene. It had been some sort of small animal, perhaps a dog, dachshund maybe, now denuded of its fur and skin. A fresh blood trail smeared itself across the length of the enormous lobby, defiling its large mosaic compass. The crow part of me just couldn’t resist, couldn’t let it go, couldn’t heed Dennis’s warning, and I fluttered from one light fixture to another to get a closer look at whose bright, freshly freed blood it was. I could make out a black body on its side. The smearing blood trail stopped underneath it. I dropped down to a bench next to the black body in order to get a closer look.

  The gorilla lay like a cheese curl, and I could see that most of its back was missing. A deep gurgle released from it, making me jump, and I saw its chest rise—a Herculean effort. I hopped closer, mesmerized by the deeply lined skin of its face, a gentle map, a bright round moon with pleasing features and lips that could form words and convey a library of expressions. Its bulging brow held history, lessons learned, pockets of sorrow. Its wrinkles told me stories; the white chin whiskers conjured a memory of the spiced, woodsy scent of shaving cream. A fire roared inside me—the urge to preen its sparsely fine fur. I fell deeply in love with its twitching hands, so beautiful and complex, with the wondrous joints and smooth spongy skin of a MoFo, briefly coiling as if to catch a thought, an idea, or to grip the whole world. The heartbreaking wonder of fingers. Then the gorilla opened its eyes, eyes that knew a lot of things I wanted to, eyes the limpid color of Fireball whiskey. Those eyes registered me, reflecting back the clear image of an inky bird, a plucky, twig-legged investigator I didn’t recognize, didn’t connect with. The bird looked at me, darting and dauntless with shrewd swagger. So fingerless and feathered. I felt the sudden suffocation of shame.

  The gorilla sighed and I watched the vital spark in its eyes take flight. It entered me, I felt it take up residence in my heart. The gorilla—a female, I was sure of it—exhaled for the last time, her bluish, rubbery hand relaxed, body unclenching to send her soul airborne. An upward adventure.

  I caught my breath and came back to earth. Wake up, S.T. Something had mauled the gorilla, and another glance around the station made one thing clear: this was that something’s den. It wasn’t far away and it wouldn’t be gone for long. A trail of prints, perfectly captured in bright red blood on shiny marble, led away from the gorilla’s fetal form and across the lobby floor. Big, bad prints that spoke to me in a particularly emphatic way, mainly saying, “Fuck off.”

  I rose into the air and dove through the station, slipping through a glassless window and arrowing down to Dennis, whose tail erupted into air-lashings as soon as he saw me. We bolted away from the station. Dennis’s paws pounded the pavement, my wings set the wind free, and I cawed out to Aura for help, calling a name I’d heard before in Aura’s song and sigh, while scanning for biting things below. Sadness tugged at my tail feathers. I would have liked to have talked to the gorilla, learned its secrets and stories and how it ended up in a train station in downtown Seattle missing the flesh around its spine. I hoped my presence had at least provided a little comfort, because it had done absolutely fuck all to dispel our stereotype as the harbingers of death.

  Minutes later, we found ourselves at the mecca of Seattle sports fandom, a fishbowl of Emerald City hope: CenturyLink Field. Strange sounds echoed from its deep chasm. I called out. No birds responded, so I told Dennis to lie down under another London plane tree, three of her branches vehemently pointing north. “Go back!” she rumbled.

  “We can’t! Aura is this way, I can feel it in my feathers!”

  The London plane was near a blue trash can with the Seahawks emblem blazoned on the side. I was comforted by its familiar Pacific Northwest Coast tribal design, said to be inspired by a Kwakwaka’wakw mask. Kwakwaka’wakw is my favorite word because it is easy for me to pronounce. A damn sight easier than “rural brewery.” A nap under the London planes would give Dennis a chance to rest and recover, but leaving him to do recon was getting harder and harder. Any time he was out of my sight, I felt my blood quicken, and I had developed the nervous, derpy head-bob of a damned pigeon. It was just me and Dennis in this spiky New World, a tiny but impactful murder, and murders are not something you ever, ever turn your back on. Every time he disappeared into the tall, unruly grass to do his business, I’d hold my breath, unable to inhale until his stupid, hangdog countenance emerged and he did that weird moonwalk-grass-kicking ritual. This got pretty dangerous for me at times, considering how he peed in three-minute streams like a goddamned Clydesdale.

  I shot up the side of CenturyLink Field and was hit by a dank, putrid smell as I hovered over its center, settling onto a metal edge of the stadium’s roof. The scene was shocking. The sky frowned in dark clouds. Pigeons had painted the stadium’s partial roof in corrosive white, which had mixed with the rains to form a hole-burning acid, but their empty nests lay soaked and abandoned. I wondered who or what had sent them flapping. The stadium had flooded, filled with a swampy, green soup. A chorus of frogs harmonized in pulsing bursts like Dennis’s squeaker toys. Vines and creepers hung from the stadium’s sides, greedily smothering the bleachers, where I saw rogue bones and lost limbs, an upturned cooler, a muddy sneaker, part of a ball cap. Weeds and muck and fungus and creaky-legged insects had invaded, and the smell of bat shit stung my beak. Rust was conquering the stadium’s metallic structure, the suites collapsed and spilling brick guts onto the bleachers below. A decaying stench rose from the swampy soup, where MoFos in algae-slick numbered jerseys bobbed rhythmically in the watery depths. Two helmeted MoFos drifted close, then smashed their helmets together as if gripped by the cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs hormones of rutting season. Another MoFo, mossy, muscled, and missing both a helmet and a head to protect, smacked its arms against the deep, wet murkiness. One with the number 31 on his back clawed up the bleachers, red eyes hunting. Number 16 sprung like a flea to climb the face of the field scoreboard. Jersey-ed bodies floated facedown. I squinted from a high distance, distinguishing the rutting players as “Wilson 3” and “Sherman 25.” These were Seahawks fans. I bet they’d known they were sick and cureless. They had come here in their jerseys to await their fate. Their final choice. Loyal until the end. As a homegrown Seattleite, this caused a throbbing ache to hammer on the chambers of my Space Needle–shaped heart.

  A single sign prevailed: Home of the Twelves. The twelfth man, meaning the Seahawks football fans, the symbolic twelfth player on the field, cheering from the sidelines, loud as a jet plane. The twelfth man, proud peacocks who flashed their blues and greens, had roared like animals and broken sound records and caused false starts and earthquakes and believed their way to Super Bowl victory. Big Jim and I watched every Seahawks game, squawking at the screen, decked in spirited blue and green garb. Nargatha knitted me a nifty Seahawks scarf that I was very proud of, even if Big Jim called me “nerd bird” when I was wearing it. Nargatha, whose family lived on the East Coast and sometimes forgot her because of New York minutes, often got lonely. She would come over during halftime and bring us a chicken pot pie while remi
nding Big Jim he needed to eat healthier. I liked how she would prod him in his belly, perhaps the only one who had access to his soft spot. And sometimes we would win and Big Jim would set off fireworks in the yard and Dennis would wet himself and I’d tell the college crows to suck it as they dove for cover because I was a fucking phoenix. Big Jim would have given his right arm to have played here with the other twelves. I was glad he couldn’t see what had become of our beautiful, glorious stadium. Our team’s loyal fans. One could only hope that in days past they had smelled better.

  I suddenly realized that the croaking had stopped. Something had silenced the frogs. Something or someone, I wasn’t sure. Concentric circles rippled from an origin point in the green and I watched and waited, breath hitched. A sly sliver of dark broke above the water’s surface. Please be another MoFo, I hoped, tapping my toes in terror. The circles stopped forming, larger ones dissipating and dying out. Wilson 3 and Sherman 25 continued struggling in the water, smashing their helmets together, oblivious of the new silence. The palpable threat.

  An eruption burst from the flood’s surface, algae raining down. An enormous mass—a barrel of gray and pink—lunged and fell on top of the two players, jaws clamping down on Wilson 3. The splash sent debris flying, drenching the bleachers in putrid green rain. I cawed out, but what could I do to stop it? As the giant mammal shook Wilson 3 from side to side, my eyes widened. I recognized the rounded ears, the wide-set marble eyes, the girth of a rubber-skinned beast that took up most of the TV screen when it showed up on National Geographic.

  A goddamned hippopotamus. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that any of this was anything but horrible, hideous Ambien-induced psychosis. How had he left the confines of his zoo habitat? A gorilla and now a hippopotamus? African animals roaming the city of Seattle? The cogs in my mind began to spin, ideas forming like clusters of clouds. A white streak of movement above me caught my eye, and I looked up to see a solitary gull cruising past. I launched into the air calling after him, “Hey, hey, hey!”

  The gull turned his head midflight to register me. “What’s up?”

  “I’m trying to make contact and I can’t hear anything,” I told him, breathlessly. “I need to follow up on something I heard…I need to know—”

  “Aura or Echo?” he asked, tangerine beak slicing through the air.

  “Aura!” I shot back.

  “Follow me!” screeched the gull in that water-skimming pitch of theirs as he flapped casually. He was a cool customer, seemingly undisturbed by the thrashing water, the bloody carnage below, the violent demolition by an African predator in a distinctly Northwestern football stadium. I flapped hard to catch up and decided not to look down anymore. I tried to shake panicky thoughts about the hippo—an herbivore, I was sure of it—behaving like an insatiable carnivore. It must have been eliminating any suspected threat or competition. Either that or it had made an exception to its vegetarian diet, which was altogether possible. Big Jim went on several Tinder dates with females who were vehemently vegan “except for bacon.”

  The gull flew over WaMu Theater and T-Mobile Park, where the Seattle Mariners play, but I didn’t look down, couldn’t look down. From the sounds that echoed from below, I knew the scene would be similar to the stadium and I just couldn’t. I didn’t need to see to know. I caught up to the gull as a direct result of my crow-curiosity disorder. “You said Echo too; where would you be taking me if I wanted to get information from Echo?”

  “Depends on what you want to know.” Here his chest filled with air, puffed proud, and for some utterly inexplicable reason, I felt calm. “The bay, the ocean, the sound, wherever you need. I can do it all, crow friend. I can relay current events straight from Echo too. That’s what we do. Us, the terns, sandpipers, kingfishers, and cormorants, we are the connection between Echo and Aura. Bridge of sea and sky. It’s a beautiful thing. Life, my friend, life is a beautiful thing.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” I muttered, grateful for the help, as unexpected as it was. I would never again refer to them as “schlubby beach pigeons.”

  What he said next roughly translates as, “It’s cool, man. Everything’s totally cool. You just keep on doing what you’re meant to be doing. You are flying the good flight.” Glaucous-winged gulls. Turns out they’re unflappable.

  He flew east from there and I followed, enjoying the contrails of calm that came off him. It gave me a quiet, panic-free moment to think about the realization I’d put together from my encounter with the gorilla and hippopotamus in the urban jungle of Seattle. How I now had a plan for Dennis and myself. Despite my new sense of composure, I couldn’t let my guard down. I was grateful to the gull, but I still didn’t trust other feathereds easily. They can be tricksters and bullies, and according to CNN, they might just slap you with a spot of avian flu.

  The gull touched down in a park with a spectacular view of downtown Seattle, freeways snaking around its periphery like a twisted noose. I stared at the city’s skyline. Oh, how I longed to hear the blare of an impatient car horn, the malignant symptoms of road rage. How I longed for the wail of a siren, the roar of an airplane, the tinny voice at a pedestrian crossing, “Walk sign is on at all crossings!” I’m sure at one point the park was very well preened with tidy flower beds and John Deere tracks. Now it was choking on an army of sharp-toothed brambles that smothered the land with their spiny talons. I spotted one patch of exposed grass, not as tall as the rest, and walked on it for nostalgia’s sake. An earthworm rose from the soil, dramatically postulating about “the great change” and how “She will show no mercy as She takes back what is Hers and that it is time for the Great Coming, the inevitable hostile takeover of Her relentless hands.” I ate him.

  I hopped on top of a sign that said, “Dr. Jose Rizal Park.” The glaucous-winged gull perched on the roof of the park’s barbecue shelter. I examined his perfectly ivory plumage and the shock of gray on his wings—the pale gray of a misty morning. His eyes, bright and yolky, had a calming effect. I had largely ignored the very occasional gull that flew over our house, aside from hurling an artful insult, “Begone, pubic badger!” or a Creed CD case at them. It had seemed so easy to dismiss them as floating French fry receptacles. I wanted to ask him about Echo, about what it’s like to hear the songs of the sea, how it feels to fly great distances. What does it taste like when you are so free you can follow the sun until it dips down into the ocean? But it was best to keep these wonderings to myself. Best to keep up barbed-wire boundaries and focus on looking after numero uno.

  “Hmm. The trees are talking to you, never seen that. That’s cool.” The gull nodded his head vigorously. “Go ahead, call from here. Everyone will hear. It’s all perfect.” He was so mellow that my nictitating membranes licked my eyes lazily.

  I cleared my throat and called out to Aura, speaking a name that had excited me since I’d first heard it whispered through the limbs of trees. “Hello! Excuse me! I’m looking for those who know of ‘The One Who Opens Doors!’”

  Aura erupted in chatter, songbirds singing, charms of finches relaying my message, a murmuration of starlings taking flight to spread my query. And within some amount of time that I can’t be sure of because I still didn’t really understand time and none of the clocks worked anymore, I got an answer.

  Chapter 13

  S.T.

  Dr. Jose Rizal Park, Seattle,

  Washington, USA

  Word got back quickly. The ones with information about The One Who Opens Doors were on their way to me. I was warned it would take them some time, which was fine because I was absorbed by an unusual sight. Seattle spring has more moods than Tiffany S. from Tinder, and now the sun decided that it should shine brightly. Celebrating the sun, the murmuration of starlings were performing a synchronized dance, dazzling with a shape-shifting air show. The birds swooped and dove, carefree, oscillating, and shimmery, the afternoon sun bouncing off their wings. All together, they formed a black cloud that morphed into a circle, then cinched in
precisely at all the right places to render a Pringles tube and then a twisty shape like a pretzel. They were one, a single entity. Expand, contract, breathe, dance, be. They were performing for an audience of one—a baby elephant. The young elephant, its skinny grass snake of a tail flicking high in excitement, limp trunk swinging to and fro, darted across Twelfth Avenue in front of me. He stomped excitedly with soft, flat feet that resembled young tree trunks. His fanned-out leather earflaps, undulating furless butt, and wide, shiny eyes were utterly delightful. The baby pachyderm, eager eyes to the sky, chased the wave of birds, buoyantly mimicking their dance, delighting in the way they painted the afternoon. Through the tree crowns, a cautionary trumpet sounded out in an unmistakably parental tone. Ma, or some other family member, was nearby and I was glad. The game of chase went on and on and part of me hoped it would never stop.

  I enjoyed the pleasantness of the moment, surprised to find myself giddy, as if full of beer bubbles that fizzed their way to freedom. A healthy, happy elephant calf—turns out that’s something that can fill up a heart. I’d read in the Seattle Times that the Woodland Park Zoo had phased out its elephant sanctuary, that zoos in general were doing so because of the difficulty in providing an enriching environment. Space was an issue too; it was hard to provide enough of it for the healthy interaction of a whole herd. Yet here was this little one, no longer facing the threat of having his tusks lopped off to make a letter opener or that his lasting legacy might be a photograph of a smiling MoFo standing, rifle in hand, on his lifeless trophy. I imagine he had come all the way from Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma, from miles and miles away. Now he had all the space of a whole new earth to dance around in. Gorilla, hippo, and now elephant, stamping Seattle soil with their prints. How had this come to be? This was a strange new realm with new rules that were hard to keep up with. I wished the little elephant well. MoFos revered elephants, and even in this little pipsqueak, I could see why. They are large and charming, confident and curious, and apparently, they never forget…