I found my prey in the middle of the avenue, standing on letters where someone had poured out a message in gas and lit it on fire. TURN IT ALL OFF, the blackened message cried. She was staring at the sky, still and white as a birch. Her pants and vest were of shiny black leather, her hair a long, silver rope. Tattoos spidered up her doughy arms—a naked pinup woman straddling a torpedo, a laughing skull wearing a beanie, a motorbike that was on fire—art prophetically imitating life, seeing as how a Harley lay charred on the sidewalk nearby. She was corpulent, surprisingly intact, and with a wattle like Dennis’s. She was absolutely perfect for my purposes.
I croaked at Dennis, preparing him for what was to happen next. With his fur grasped in my feet, I could feel his stiffening reluctance to go near the biker MoFo. But time had been brought back to our world in the form of a battery whose limited life drained away by the minute. We needed to act fast. We passed the biker MoFo to give ourselves an advantage. I ruffled my feathers to calm my nerves, quietly telling myself that this was what I was good at. S.T., A+ honors student of luring, had become the teacher. Gingerly, I placed the cell phone onto Dennis’s thick back. It was time.
I used my beak to long-press the power button, remembering Big Jim’s delight the first time I’d gotten it right, the Cheeto® reward, that cheddar-y flavor of success. “Good boy, Shit Turd.” The phone lit up underneath me, an electric bright screen and an apple silhouette. I looked up. The biker Mofo’s neck snapped toward me, red eyes widening. A horrible shrill whine streaked through the midmorning silence. The Unicorn MoFo swiveled. Horn and penis swinging, he locked us in his sights.
“Let’s go!” I screeched at Dennis, driving my claws into his back. The MoFos broke into a run. Dennis kicked into high gear, thundering across Phinney Avenue. Ducking and clenching so hard my feet shook, I pressed against the wind that threatened to topple me from Dennis. A peek behind me revealed two MoFos, necks craned forward, bouncing unblinking red eyes, their legs pounding the road at an unnatural speed. They were gaining on us. Dennis was fast, but he was no greyhound, and whatever the sickness was, it gave the MoFos strength and speed they’d never had before. Another quick glance—the MoFos had halved the distance between us. I could smell them, the hot scent of decay. I heard their tendons and bones creaking under the impact. They were galloping.
“Faster, Dennis! Faster!” I told him with my feet and the panic seeping from my plumage. The biker let out a deafening shriek. The unicorn coughed back. They were gaining on us. We shot past more apartment buildings, the day care center, and then I could see the Douglas fir pointing from the sky and I said a small prayer that I made up on the spot, as best as an agnostic crow can do. Then Dennis was hurling us up the stone steps of the teal and white house and I jumped off his back using everything I had. I fluttered up to the window ledge, grasping its splintery wooden edge with my feet. I turned. The biker MoFo was in the lead, silver rope swinging behind her, glistening leather and rolls of doughy white skin surging forth, pounding the stone steps, naked unicorn right on her heels. I had seconds to get it right. As her foot touched the Welcome doormat, I whipped my head sideways, sending the iPhone airborne. Throwing myself from the ledge, I scattered out of the way.
I heard the glass shattering before I had the chance to turn and witness the glory. The biker MoFo burst through into the living room, rolling onto the ground and releasing the room’s hot breath of fetid air. The unicorn scampered in after her. I fluttered back up the ledge to see both of them diving for the hardwood where the iPhone had settled. They huddled, necks craned unnaturally, worshipping the screen’s bright glow. They extended their arthritic pointer fingers, tracing them listlessly against the iPhone’s screen. Silence. It worried me. My eyes darted around the glass carpet, around the empty wrappers and dusty furniture. Where was Cinnamon? I bobbed my head in preparation, then, in my best Big Jim, I said, “ZzzzZZZt! Come!”
Several painful moments of stillness slogged by. Just decay and dog shit and broken MoFos feeding their mysterious addiction. Had she run? Panicked and hurt herself? Had she curled up in a corner and…I couldn’t bring myself to think of it. And then two tiny button eyes framed by a mane of flaming ginger appeared from under an armchair.
“ZzzzZZZt! Come! Quickly!” I repeated. Cinnamon gave the MoFos a skittish wide berth as she scuttled to the window. With one agile leap, she cleared the ledge and was met by Dennis, who had emerged from his hiding spot. He was especially goofy in his rapture, all dangling ears and flopping wattle and four left paws. He huffed in open mouthed delight. The pair inspected one another’s buttholes, upholding perhaps the very worst tradition from our old life, and Dennis offered the little redhead a play bow. Cinnamon didn’t seem ready to play yet. She panted heavily, overexerted, high on freedom and fear. The whites of her eyes showed. I nipped that play shit in the bud, jumping on Dennis’s back and rallying the troops forward. Cinnamon scurried to catch up, eager to escape the place she’d done hard time in.
“You alright?” I asked her.
“Yes,” came her response, as fragile as the first tinkling notes of a hummingbird hatchling. Perhaps it would take time for Cinnamon to be herself again. I would give her space to come around. Our little murder had grown, and the three of us had the rest of a purpose to carry out. We’d lost our bait to a biker and a unicorn, but I had another plan. And for the first time in an age, the clock was ticking.
Chapter 19
S.T.
God Knows Where along Phinney Avenue, Seattle, Washington, USA
We had set off, the three of us, determined to find the others. The other Dennises and Cinnamons and S.T.s. The survivors. Telephone poles lay collapsed on their sides in the middle of Phinney Avenue, their wires twisted like discarded dental floss. An electronics repair shop had been ransacked and gutted, hit at one point by a hurricane of searching MoFos. I told Dennis and Cinnamon to wait by the front of the shop as I hopped through its graveyard of smashed plastic, motherboards, televisions with busted faces, and snaking wires. Shelves had been ripped from the walls, now rife with beckoning black holes. A strange, hauntingly high-pitched song provided an eerie soundtrack. I set out to find where the music came from.
A teeming mischief of rats and a clutter of spiders with hairy, beaver-brown bodies had divided the shop into their respective territories. The spiders watched me near their precious nest, rearing onto their hind legs and hissing obscenities at me. The female one was particularly vicious, vowing that if I took one more step closer, she would bind, gag, and torture my entire family with her infrangible silks. The rats were quick to assess that I wasn’t a threat, continuing with their avid grooming—they’re massively anal about personal hygiene—while some convened for a meeting about plans to create a network of tunnels they were calling “The Real Seattle Underground.” The eerie song turned out to be the symphony of rats filing down their ever-growing choppers on a hollow lead pipe, a wailing, sinister siren song that seemed perfect for the times we lived in. There were no cell phones. Cinnamon, Dennis, and I set back off down Phinney Avenue. We came across a King 5 helicopter that had crashed on top of a silver Tesla, bisecting it. Its once-sleek lines were now severed, jutting and sharp. Oily tire tracks—signs of panicked escape—zigzagged across Phinney Avenue, now a phantom of its former self.
Then we found a row of houses. The first was a towering brick Tudor home, its front yard choking on weeds, its arched entryway leading to a covered porch. I indulged in a fantasy—I just couldn’t help myself—of rapping my beak on the door. The door opens and there stands a MoFo with a straight back and clear eyes. “Are you alright?” they ask me. And then I tell them everything and, nodding their head, they stroke the length of my feathers with a smooth finger while offering me a condolence Cheeto®. The MoFo with clear, bright eyes tells us everything is going to be okay, that there’s a cure. That everything will go back to the way it was, goodness I’m devastatingly handsome, and would I like a croissant?
I was still warm
, glowing from the daydream, when I hopped up the steps and under the arched entryway. I thrust myself onto a porch bench—the wooden swinging kind—to peer in through the intact bay windows. The home looked unsullied—floor-to-ceiling library of undisturbed books, orca-black grand piano, a marble bust of an old white MoFo. A wall-sized painting of two African female MoFos laughing together, heads swathed in bright blue, red, and green wraps, their long necks dripping with gold, faced the front door. I hoped, a deep hope from the part of me that answers when I’m very still, that they were still out there, laughing together under an African sun. That they weren’t just a gold-framed painting in a broken city. And then my eyes tracked along a Persian carpet, at the edge of which was a large beige lump. My heart plummeted. I could tell from the stillness of the scene, from the chest’s lack of rise and fall that the English mastiff’s heart no longer beat. This would be the picture in a lot of homes, I imagined, where the domestics couldn’t get out, didn’t have anyone to answer their desperate pleas. Dennises with no S.T.s. I started to move away from the front door, ready to find the next home, a small stone lodged in my throat.
I hadn’t noticed Dennis and Cinnamon come up the steps. They were side by side at the front door. Dennis dragged his pancake paws down the wood, Cinnamon pacing in tight circles by his side.
“Look again,” she was telling me. I hopped back onto the swinging bench and surveyed the scene again. This time I caught the shining sets of eyes staring at me from underneath the grand piano. There were two other living beings in the Tudor house. Ignited with purpose, I fluttered back to Dennis and jumped onto his back.
“Dennis, let’s go!” I told him. We had to act quickly. I couldn’t tell what shape the cowering dogs were in, but the deceased English mastiff told a story of starvation. I tried to think—where else would we find a phone? It had been such a trial to find the last one, only to have it pillaged by the sick MoFo equivalent of the Village People. There were more houses to our left, but how were we to get inside to find a phone if a phone was the very thing we needed to get inside? It felt like that whole chicken-and-egg conundrum that MoFos are always squabbling about. Phones were now our highest currency, and it would take me time and MoFo-like imagination to find one.
“Let’s go, Dennis! Cinnamon!” I said, and with little scampering Cinnamon bringing up the caboose, we took off back up Phinney Avenue, stopping before we reached the electronics repair shop. I jumped from Dennis and sidled up to the mangled mass of twisted metal that was left of the King 5 helicopter and the silver Tesla. I gingerly stepped between lumps of scorched metal, shredded bits of airbag, and masses of splintered glass. The Tesla’s steering wheel was embedded in one of the chopper’s seats, now lying in the middle of the road like a terrifying art installation on vehicle safety. Eventually, I found what I was looking for. I picked up a sheet of glass, approximately the size of a tablet screen, and gingerly waddled back to Dennis.
The glass felt like Big Jim’s framed photo of Tiffany S. that I once tried to jettison from the upstairs window, heavy and awkward to hold on to. It took the last of the aged bourbon butterscotch treat in me to flap back onto Dennis, glass sheet balanced in my beak. I laid the glass flat onto Dennis’s back but as soon as he started to walk, his lumbering sway made it slip. I barely caught it in my beak, settling for holding it, as uncomfortable as it was, partially propped up on Dennis’s back. Dennis sat down abruptly, causing me and the glass sheet to slide down the length of him. I was pushed onto my back and pinned against the tarmac by the glass.
“Caaaaw! Help…I can’t…ugh…stuck…heavy…fuuuuuck,” I squawked, trying to wriggle out from the hefty sheet. “Gah! Nfff! Raa!” It wouldn’t budge. This is it, I thought, this is where our beloved hero gets flower-pressed beneath glass for eternity like some sort of priceless sports collectible. “Dennis!”
Dennis’s enormous nose lingered above me, his breath clouding the glass with moisture. He stared at me blankly for a few moments. There was a subtle spark in his saggy eyes—a look of amusement.
“Dennis! For the love of Tostitos! A little help?”
He yawned.
“Dennis! GET THIS OFF ME!” I squawked, feeling like an unsold Barbie.
A weight literally lifted from my chest. I struggled to my feet to see that Dennis had the glass between his jowls and was patiently waiting for me to hop back onto his back. He’d enjoyed the crap out of the whole scenario, that Skittle-brained scoundrel.
We walked back along Phinney Avenue in a tender shuffle. Cinnamon scurried along next to us. She was a skittish little thing, tongue lapping the air like a tiny plumeria petal. Her scars did not line her body, but nevertheless showed in her darting eye movements, the flinches that rippled under her fur. She was at all times ready to break into a run. Like Dennis, she wasn’t much of a talker, and I didn’t know how much of that had to do with what she’d been through.
As we shuffled up to the overgrown primrose, lilac, and Black Beauty elderberry bushes that once framed and now were proliferating around the Tudor house, we encountered our next problem: where to find a MoFo. The unicorn and the biker had been too fast once riled and were now too far away, no sense to backtrack. This section of Phinney Avenue was quiet and deserted. Fluttering to the ground with a body full of adrenaline and an injured wing was tricky. Much to my surprise, I was beginning to feel a microscopic fleck of empathy for penguins, finally understanding what it’s like to essentially be a winged Mr. Magoo. But I wasn’t going to let it get me down, no sir. MoFos didn’t have wings and they were the greatest creatures on earth. After almost impaling myself on a crystalline edge, I helped Dennis gently lay the sheet down onto the tarmac and looked around. No sign of MoFos. We would have to wander in search of them, but that meant carrying the awkward slice of glass with us, which slowed us down, made us incredibly vulnerable, and put us farther away from where we wanted to be—the Tudor house. I fluttered back onto Dennis’s back and then noticed something. Cinnamon was trembling. A full body shake had her in its talons. She stared ahead, across the street. Dennis, seeming to sense my intentions, plodded forward to where she was staring. Cinnamon did not follow. She stood on the tarmac, fear squeezing her throat.
“What is it, Cinnamon?” I asked with a head cock.
“There. They’re right there.” Her ginger fur was puffed.
Across the street was another house, a Seattle foursquare home festooned with sleeping Christmas lights. In the front yard, surrounded by an ambush of brambles, an inflatable Santa and his compressed reindeer team rippled at the mercy of the afternoon wind. The wind blew to a crescendo, tousling my feathers. I looked up at pregnant, darkening clouds that converged overhead. A syrupy smell of anticipation filled the air; the grass was anxiously awaiting the rain, its thirst palpable. Dennis’s careful lumber slowed, his head hung low, ears and facial folds flapping against the glass sheet, as he inhaled clues to a world most of us will never know. He was taking us to the source of Cinnamon’s tremors. He stopped as we neared the rusted green mailbox of the house, before we’d reached the trunk of a voluptuous pin oak tree. Slow as a snail’s silver, he raised his nose and the glass sheet in line with the oak. My face now numb from clenching my beak, I fluttered from his back, and helped him gently prop the glass against the curb. A sharp blast of wind lifted me off my feet. I flapped hard to lower back to the tarmac, a jolt of pain streaking up my wing. The ringing quiet of it all bothered me. It wasn’t good that I couldn’t even hear the boil-brained twits of Aura squabbling and gloating about their sexual capabilities. A few steps took me underneath the gigantic pin oak that draped me in shadow with its plethoric dressing of leaves. Not being able to see the sky summoned winter to my veins. Then I saw what made Cinnamon tremble.
Above me, six legs dangled from separate branches. One owner of two legs was a geisha; the white paint of her face had mingled with blood, streaking her olive-green kimono in sickly pink. Her once-impeccable ebony chignon and its decorative kanzashi now hung lim
p, strands like greasy eels. She had no eyes, just red-crusted, empty holes. On the thick collar of the branch was another MoFo dressed in frilly Victorian garb, rib cage suffocated by a corset, billowing bloody fabric cascading from the branch. The third MoFo wore a traditional Korean hanbok, once resplendent in crayon orange and pink, now speckled with moss and gelatinous lumps of MoFo tissue. One of her arms hung by a few defiant strands of skin. Around her grimy neck hung a lanyard, an access card for Seattle Historical Costuming. Between the three MoFos was a gaping tree hollow. The MoFos were silent as midnight tombstones. They used their humped backs and unnatural elongated necks to stretch out and touch their skulls to a black object. Stuffed into the tree’s cavernous hollow was one of those headsets you put on your eyes to transport you to another world. The three costumed MoFos repeatedly leaned in, pressing their foreheads to the shiny black plastic. I stifled a cry of horror.
Many months ago, I had sat in my cozy craftsman home as Big Jim lay gently marinating in Fireball whiskey and Ben & Jerry’s, snoring like a DeWalt power saw. My heart soared; I loved this part of the day. I fluttered over to him, commandeering the remote and channel surfing for hours, absorbing the rich and nuanced history of MoFos. I learned about the Maasai tribe of Africa with their elongated earlobes and ability to speak Maa, English, and Swahili! I learned of the Alaska Inuit, the Aikenhead clan, and the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe, how the young Brazilian Sataré-Mawé MoFos dip their hands into a woven basket of fire ants for eleven hours to show their bravery. I watched the porcelain politesse of a Japanese tea ceremony, the Icelandic celebration of Sjómannadagur for the seafaring MoFos, the Monkey Buffet Festival of Thailand, and how young Greek MoFos’ teeth are thrown onto rooftops with an expectant wish. These were all ways to paint a life, customs to celebrate the phenomenal gift of living. I’d been so mesmerized, my heart as light as the barbs of a semiplume, thinking of how a MoFo was capable of carving out the world to be anything they wished. And here sat three representatives of MoFos’ rich history, rotting in the boughs of an oak. I was witnessing the slow extermination of MoFo history and culture. And it was absolutely devastating.
Hollow Kingdom Page 15
