Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  “Why wouldn’t my just kill the little black bird and take the Keeper for myself?” asked the tiger with all the warmth of an autopsy table.

  I improvised, trying to conceal my quaking legs. “Because of the mouse and the lion. It’s…uh…a very well-known jungle story. Once there was a lion who was about to eat a mouse, but the mouse said, ‘Spare me! Let me go and someday I’ll repay you!’ And the lion did. And then one day, the lion was caught in a hunter’s net and I think he also had a thorn stuck in his paw, and the mouse came to his rescue by gnawing through the hunter’s net, plucking out the thorn and freeing him. And he said, ‘Now you see that even a mouse can help a lion.’”

  “This is a boring bullshit story,” said the tiger. “There is no my in it.”

  “But you are like the lion in this story, you see?”

  “Hm. And you are like the mouse?” asked the tiger.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “My is the lion in this jungle story?”

  “Yes. And maybe also a little the thorn.”

  I wish I could tell you what was going on in that large feline skull. The lead tiger looked back at his brothers. The marginally less violent one was rolling on his back, grumbling with padded paws in the air as Dee ran the branch across his belly. The other was attempting to headbutt everything within a six-foot radius.

  “Where do we prowl to?” he growled. And I told him. He wrinkled his nose to snarl. “No. Not there.”

  “If you want her”—I gestured to the most novel prize on this big beautiful blue—“you’ll have to take us.”

  So that’s how we ended up here.

  Picture this: A once-residential street in Edmonds wrapped in greedy weeds, frozen in time. Where cobweb-coated houses wear crowns of moss, and all around, ghostly pale trees hold their breath.

  Picture an overcast sky filled with the most magnificent bald eagle, her wings like water. Picture the inky silhouette of a crow (super fucking handsome) perched on her downy back. Picture below them a streak of enormous male tigers in Halloween colors. Triangular trio of flame and ink. Picture, at the helm, the smallest of these three, a predator with quick claws and a grudge like Gorilla Glue. Behind him a few pawprints, picture his brother, a cat with memories of MoFos and milk bottles, wearing a slinky stride and a sandpaper tongue. To his right, picture the biggest tiger of them all—the biggest you’ve seen—a cat who pounds the perishing asphalt, whose shoulders undulate with the ascendancy of waves. And striding in-line with the two largest tigers, picture this—

  The last MoFo on earth, an apex predator above them all. A being so heart-crushingly beautiful the clouds part for her, enamored of her upright elegance. Look at how she balances on toes swaddled in mukluks once handcrafted by the dancing fingers of her family. Picture a peony-cheeked being with intelligence blazing behind bonfire eyes, stars beneath her glabrous skin. Picture a girl, the last girl, who survived because she was stitched together with stories and the hope they held.

  Dee clasped the branch, swinging it to keep the cats in-line with a jab to their hulking bodies. She knew, my clever MoFo, about the tidal pull of invisible instinct, and so she knew never to turn her back on a tiger. She pressed on, passing houses speckled with bullet holes, bushes the size of woolly mammoths, a bulldozer with a broken nose, the rusting debris of her kind’s legacy, stains of bombs and smoke and fire. All alien sights to Dee, an immigrant to humanity. And she always, always kept the spots on the back of black feline ears, like surprised eyewhites, in her sights.

  But what was so terrifying about all of this—other than the obvious idiocy of putting our trust in three tigers—was that there was almost no life. I had been so afraid of encountering another degenerated MoFo or a Changed One like the one on the boat, but I hadn’t expected this. There were no Changed Ones. Only horrifically yucky eyeball soup. The occasional insect and dweller of Web bugged out at the sight of the formidable apex predator gang—tiger, MoFo, bald eagle, and badass crow—and honestly, who could blame them? We looked like a fucking Salvador Dalí painting.

  Migisi and I watched from the sky, making sure nothing ahead could surprise us.

  “What is wrong? What has happened to you!” I asked stagnant maples and evergreens. I attempted to tune in to Aura and never took my BB-pellet eyes off what the felines were doing, mentally adding “cat herder” to my résumé.

  “What has happened here? Tell me!” I yelled down to the largest tiger.

  “Fight rules now,” he said. “Claw is king.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Silence!” he roared.

  We were quick to learn that tigers are not only vague as crap but they have the attention span of Instagram addicts. They bounded after anything that twitched, which in this hollow suburbia was every skittering leaf or evacuation shelter pamphlet with lofty dreams of elsewhere. They got bored and destroyed things for no apparent reason, taking out tantrums on trash. Endless claw sharpening. Incessant yawning. And they peed on everything. We had to perch on a mailbox, perishing of boredom, while they played hockey with a hubcap or “groomed” by saliva-sliming themselves with a tongue covered in the thorns of some death-metal desert plant. Inevitably their treasures lost their luster and would be peed upon in corrosive yellow signatures. The worst part? They inspired Dee to pee willy-nilly!

  “No! Dee, discretion, for the love of Pete! Behind the tree and hide your pee, remember! Bury it in leaves!”

  This was a major setback. The tigers had inspired her to defy the fundamental nuance and classic literary virtuosity that is Poop! There It Is!

  Alas, big cats are as annoying as small cats, though instead of cat scratchers they used fir trees, and instead of stealing socks they pillaged the rear-mounted tires from Jeep Wranglers. They were taken with whacking things off other things, then staring disapprovingly at Dee as if she were responsible. And most irritating of all, they were unreasonably obsessed with boxes. Upon finding the rare box that had survived—whether Walmart or Amazon—the tigers would fight over who won the right to squash his box of fart into box of Amazon, only to then stare into oblivion awaiting knighthood. And every few steps, a black-and-orange snake would lift into the air, and a tiger would expel an epic mist of urine like a Glade automatic air freshener with scent “Autumn Ammonia.” Even from the sky we were choking; Dee smelled like the dumpster of a San Franciscan Olive Garden. With every spritzing, Migisi screeched in despair. She took to strategically positioning herself above the trio and releasing a colossal white streak from the sky. After striping a tiger in white, she would chuckle fruitily over infuriated roars below. You had to admire her perversity.

  The advantage of all this uncertainty and feline funny business was what I had hoped for—the tigers didn’t miss anything. Tigers are normally solo striders, but these brothers had been together for years, changing their normally nocturnal hunting habits and honing their sixth sense for survival. Keen instincts meant getting to see another sunrise.

  After a long walk and squatting in a shitload of boxes, we found ourselves at a crossroads. To our right, a residential street, darkened by twisted, fingered foliage. A war of weeds fought over a handwritten sign that said, Ignoring my student debt like there’s no tomorrow. Suck my monthly statements, Sallie Mae! To our left, an overgrown park surrounding a lake. Dee lifted a mukluk toward the house-lined street. Three tigers let out strained moans, pacing side to side. Dark ears lay flattened on their great heads. It stopped Dee in her tracks. Migisi landed on a DEAD END sign, far enough away to prevent Teensy Tiger from making a corvid canapé of me. Dee froze, watching the largest tiger’s stripes flicker with ripples.

  “Death down there,” he said. “My will not go.” He let out a reverberating shudder that made my feathers stand on end. I squinted down a long street and saw silent trees, mired in shadow. Something about them was scaring the shit out of three tigers.

  “Eko,” Dee called to the largest tiger, who went by the name his MoFos had gifted him.
The middle tiger was Liem. Liem liked to swim and had about as much personality as Big Jim’s fatty lipoma. The small, homicidal one was named Olan The Asshole. Alright, it was just Olan, but that was an oversight. Dee pointed her stick at the park in the opposite direction of the trees and Eko got it. The tiger trio raced to the water and plunged themselves into the lake, ignoring my protests. Dee ran in after them, chuffing like a big cat.

  “Dee, wait! Slow down!” I felt a barb of frustration at Dee’s carelessness, her constant charging about the place and acting like an animal. She never listened to me. Migisi’s eye roll felt like seismic activity beneath me as we soared over them. And then, from the middle of the lake, concentric circles emerged right behind Olan’s bobbing body.

  “There’s something in the water!” I yelled to Dee and the tigers, paddling across grimy green that hid the horrors beneath. “Quick, get out! Get out!”

  From the circles emerged a blanched and bloated back, skin poppled with petechial hemorrhaging1 and red, roving eyes. A Changed One swam after the smallest tiger. Dee shot from the lake and yelled for the tigers to follow.

  “Come! ZzzzZZZt!” she called.

  Eko burst from the green water. Then Liem. The Changed One, bulbous eyes ballooning above the waterline, slithered across the lake. It gained momentum, closing in on Olan. Inches from having his tiger tail clamped down on, Olan sprang from the lake. The Changed One watched from the water. We prepared to flee but quickly realized that the monster had become a creature of the lake—it could no longer walk. It had atrophied, its skin slack and pulpy. Enormous and bass-like, it didn’t have the energy of the other Changed Ones we’d encountered. A horrible reminder that these things were as unpredictable as cats. The creature watched with tumefied eyes from its aqueous prison.

  Migisi and I met Dee and the tigers at the end of the lake as they shook themselves of the slimy green. I practiced Lamaze breathing for my pulse, which was now in the late stages of an African jazz number.

  Olan The Asshole was extra snappy, unnerved by his close call. Eko looked up at me as Migisi and I whirled above him.

  “The mouse saved the lion.” He was contemplative. Very un-catlike.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “My would have eaten the mouse!” roared Olan.

  A very wise MoFo once said that you should never work with children or animals, and if his species hadn’t succumbed to a hideous technological virus, I would have bought him a beer.

  Dee was thrashing water from her haystack of hair when Liem lunged at her. He knocked her flat to the grass. In a second’s snippet, he’d snatched up her wrist in between his fangs. Migisi and I dropped from the sky, bit down on his tail, and wrenched it with violence. He spun and roared. Dee shot to her feet, roared, and threw herself at his body, pushing him with all she had.

  “No!” she yelled. “Danger!” He lowered his head and chuffed at her, whilst I made a small prayer to whoever might be listening that I would give up dreaming of Pabst Blue Ribbon–dipped Cheetos® and my old collection of those hilarious monkeys that dangle from cocktail glasses if we could please just get to UW Bothell with most of our appendages.

  The Changed One in the lake slowly dipped down, disappearing into a sinister boil of bubbles. Migisi chirruped, alerting us to ducks that burst onto the scene, flapping like windup mechanical toys.

  “Is that what I think it is? She’s real!” one quacked. “Really real! I see the shadow she paints!”

  “Can we stop for a minute, Meryl? I ate some rocks to break up lunch and I think I overdid it…”

  “Focus, Rick! It’s one of those bread-throwing things!”

  “What’s bread, Meryl?”

  “I had so many options! The pick of the waddling! How did I end up with someone so uncultured?”

  They were joined by more ducks blaring, “What is that?” “What happened to its beak?” “Rick’s throwing up rocks!” “Never pick a partner for his plumage!” “How do we get it to throw bread at us like in the stories?!” until they were all chased away by a tiger with a rampant Napoleon complex and my chance to ask them questions became yet another thing doused in urine.

  The closer we got to UW Bothell, the less playful the tigers became. By the time we actually reached Bothell and my chest fizzed like shaken Pabst Blue Ribbon, they were agitated and more than a little terrifying to be around. They skulked through neighborhoods, growling at the shadows of trees and the bowels of old Bothell buildings. And when we reached UW Bothell, they were picking fights with one another. Dee’s leg was caught in a crossfire of claws, red tears streaming down her calf. Migisi dive-bombed the big cats in fury. Our adventure eagle was soaring headfirst into some sort of ontological crisis.

  “Quiet!” Eko snarled. “My have brought you here. This is where you chose,” he said, as if coughing up a bone.

  Mushroom-colored clouds darkened, frowning at my former home. I heard a crack that must have been a chamber of my heart.

  UW Bothell looked like it had been hit by a hurricane.

  Trees lay severed and splintered, ripped from the earth, their roots exposed nerve endings. Great swaths of grass had been uprooted, uncovering soil as soft as spleen. Blood stippled broken walls. The college’s roofs had partially collapsed. Barbed wire lay in haphazard spirals like sun-dried worms.

  And everywhere—feathers. Pewter gray. Pigeons. Bright cocktail colors and the soft pastels of a new nursery. Parrots. And most prevalent of all—panther-black feathers strewn everywhere like lonely ink quills.

  Crows.

  No bodies, but the delicate decor of birds everywhere. Dee lifted me to nuzzle my beak. Three tigers paced in silence. An agitated eagle swooped above. An urge to run gnawed like hunger.

  What had happened to my murder?

  I had promised my nestling to an unstable predator because I’d known I’d have support at UW Bothell, because hundreds of the taloned kind would have my back so she wouldn’t end up in the possession of three tigers. What had I done?

  Rhythmic whirring filled my ears. A blue body materialized at the tip of my beak. An ancient insect, nature’s drone, a winged master of flight and sight.

  “Come,” said the great blue skimmer, his voice the crisp crinkle of a gum wrapper. He was the haunted blue of a wrist vein, eyes like faraway worlds. “Come, quickly, light as flight. You must move like shadows and you must not, none of you, make a sound!”

  Footnotes

  1I’m a forensic pathologist, thanks to fifteen seasons of CSI.

  Chapter 15

  S.T.

  Bothell, Washington, USA

  Dee ran. Tiger paws conquered tired concrete with a spring of uncertainty. Migisi sliced through cold air. It was silent but for the breathy ruffle of feathers and silvery snaps as we broke through gossamer arachnid silks. The little spiders hid. It was a smart move; they were at great risk of drowning in a deluge of tiger urine. I hoped for wooded wisdom from the trees—maple and dogwood, plane and oak, cedar, pine, and sweet gum—with bent bodies and arthritic limbs, trees that had seen and suffered everything with the curse of sentient cells and deeply anchored roots. I needed their guidance more than ever. Still, nothing. Their silence felt like a burn, my feathers on fire with betrayal. And we had no choice but to trust, to follow that great blue skimmer as his glassy (and, from experience, frustratingly indigestible) wings whirred along deserted Bothell streets. The area was abandoned bones, a russet world, grimy and gun colored. We skulked past a thirsty gas station that had been ransacked. A yellowing poster that showcased the finest of roller cuisine broke my heart, my stomach yowling in sorrow.

  “Hey, buddy, remember me?” the gas station hot dog seemed to say, still the radioactive pink of an unsheathed dog doodle after all these years. “Remember how fucking delish I was? And dude, you could’ve had three of me for a buck! Fuck yeah!”

  We passed a giant prophetic mural of animals running—elephant, giraffe, wolf, ostrich, lioness, and the ubiquitous penguin—that sa
id:

  STAMPEDE TO THE WOODLAND PARK ZOO!

  Individual coffee stands, Seattle’s little caffeine islands, sat in varying states of disarray. I got a jolt of joy from a quick memory—Big Jim and me driving his Ford F-150 up to the tinted window of Latte-te’s. The glass would squeak aside and two breasts would bungee jump from the shack, thwarted from hitting pavement by the bikini equivalent of dental floss.

  “Mornin’, Big Jim!” Ashley would sing, as if surprised to see him.

  “Ashley! Hell of a fine day!” he’d say, though he’d just spent the drive over there cursing Punxsutawney Phil.

  “The regular?” the bikini barista would say with a flash of blue-white teeth. Her long hair always needed fondling when she asked questions.

  A slight crack in Big Jim’s voice, “Hold the sugar though; you’re sweet enough.”

  Her fuchsia lips would lift into a smirk. “You sure? You usually take a shit crap of sugar—”

  “Uh, yeah, sugar, no, the regular way’s great.” When she turned to froth the milk, Big Jim would smack himself in the head, leaving me to ponder how her Golden Globes hadn’t been parboiled by the steamer nozzle.

  “A treat for your parrot?” she’d ask, and he’d nod vigorously.

  “You know him so well!” he’d say, which wasn’t true, evinced by the fact that she still thought I was a parrot. She’d laugh, exposing her molars to the shack’s roof.

  “You’re so funny, Big Jim,” which was a vulpine move because it always fed her tip jar. And Big Jim would rev the engine excessively, cloaking her little coffee stand in F-150 fumes as he whistled Bon Jovi all the way to work. And as always, this parrot was left in awe of the striking similarities between the courtship rituals of the MoFo and the blue-footed booby.