Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  But I didn’t have to listen to Ghubari, planetary as his brain might be. I was quickly formulating a plan. Dee and I could not stay here; this was not the shelter we were looking for. Millions of MoFos sought shelter when the virus hit. Many must have made underground bunkers like the one Dee’s family had hidden in. I would bargain once more with the tigers, with the elephants, the orangutans, with whomever I needed to for short-term protection, and Dee and I would find that shelter. And we’d live there, my Dee and I, together, happy, and safe, for always.

  Tom Hanks was now hosting a pity party for one in the corner of the bar. His yellow crest hung like a collapsed sail as he stared mournfully at his toes. A MoFo word finally made perfect sense to me—crestfallen. He had not managed to keep the party vibe—he had not shared the joy of his spirit, and so he had let down his MoFo, a consummate entertainer. Ghubari and Calliope took notice of his dejected state and shared a look.

  Calliope opened her curved black beak and projected up to Tom Hanks on the bar top. “Raaaaaaaaa! I see a little silhouetto of a man…”

  The yellow crest shot into the air. “Scaramouche! Scaramouche! Will you do the fandango!” Tom Hanks resumed his zealous Irish prancing. I was reminded that it took a team to keep The Black Tide at bay.

  Early-bird light fluttered against the shed windows. We had talked all night. “Ghubari, my bones are burning. I need to rest. We can discuss more later. Please take me back,” I pleaded.

  Tom Hanks took a deep bow after finishing off a weird little ditty about milkshakes enticing young men to visit his property.

  Ghubari gestured silence as he snuffed the candles with great wing flaps, and we, three parrots and a crow, started across the dirt path lit by a haunted moon. Then the night screamed. It was a hawk’s summoning to hurry, but so much louder than any hawk I’d ever heard. Ghubari bodychecked me, slamming me against the side of a rock. Tom Hanks hid under Calliope’s great teal wing. Ghubari raised his head to the sky. I followed suit, and what I saw made my brain melt.

  Great bodies with gray pebbled skin and oily feathers sailed above. Things that were neither birds nor MoFos, but some bastardized imitation, cruised with wingspans the length of a Subaru. So large they hid the moon. I knew them instantly, remembered my best bloodhound buddy Dennis tearing along a road as they thundered behind him with ostrich legs and barreled chests. Fuliginous eyes. Malformed faces. They had changed. Smaller, lighter legs. Elongated heads. Full beaks. Functioning feathers.

  They were flying.

  Once the overhead horrors had passed, Ghubari whispered, “Go, quick as you can!” We tore across the dirt path together.

  When we entered the Tavern on the Square through the brick gap, most of the animals were asleep in their tiny territories across the dilapidated restaurant. I couldn’t process what I’d seen. My gular was break dancing in my throat. Calliope and Tom Hanks watched me with worried eyes.

  Ghubari whispered, “It is shocking; you must breathe. A lot to take in all at once, my friend. You must not be sad about all this, about your altricial girl, S.T. You know, your beloved MoFos would call you a hero for what you’ve done.” I cringed, guilt spiking up my spine. “In terms of your interpersonal human relationship, so little has changed. You had a mutually beneficial relationship with Big Jim, and look at your relationship with Dee—it’s pure symbiosis.”

  Symbiosis?! I stopped him. “Ghubari, you’re not wrong often, but about this, you’re way off base. It is not symbiosis. You have forgotten how much you once loved a brilliant MoFo named Rohan. In this wild, wild world, Dee is the reason I open my eyes; do you understand me? Her heart opened mine, its beat is the soundtrack of my soul. She is the feeling of flight. She gives me back my wings. I will tear the sun out of the sky to protect her, and as long as the ocean breathes, I will love her with the feather and fur and ferocity of every living beast on this big beautiful blue.”

  That buttoned his beak.

  Dee, Migisi, and I made a temporary home there among a refugee menagerie. I can’t tell you for how long, only that we saw quite a lot of sunsets and sunrises. While I was uncomfortable around so many animals, Dee was revitalized. She was living in a storybook come to life. For so long, she’d heard my story of Orange and Genghis, of elephants, dogs, and the bravest birds on this big beautiful blue. And here many were—crawling up her arm or attacking her ankles or chewing on her flock-of-seagull hair.3 She loved every second of running around in the story that helped grow her bones and brain. She loped around with Orange and his family. She befriended more eagles—bald and golden. She mimicked the sounds of insects, reptiles, and amphibians. It kept my hoyden of a girl in one place, levitating with happiness, but I hated how this was furthering her jungle etiquette as she learned about life from skunks and rats and horses. I worried most about the inordinate amount of time she spent crouched among flowering plants, humming to the pollinators who skittered across her skin. I was trying to raise a MoFo, not a cub, not a pup, not a kit. Why couldn’t she try harder to be who she was supposed to be? How could I get her to listen and see the magnificence in her species?

  The tigers stalked the sanctuary perimeter to be closer to her, and pachyderm protection meant they couldn’t get to her. And it wasn’t all sunshine and salmon roe. We were under siege, hiding indoors when The Changed Ones were active and flew above us, showering us with horrible screams. We could only relax when they were dormant. And those windows seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. I have just one more complaint—the crows. Our reunion was beautiful, but brief. I barely got to spend time with my beloved murder at all because they were our sedulous eyes in the sky, and they spent all their time on the roofs keeping watch or being heroes while tracking the movements of Changed Ones. The Sky Sentinels didn’t have time for play or the whiskey shed. I’d watch them streaming above, seasoning the sky with their onyx wings—but they were above me, so high above me. How I wished I could join them.

  It’s hard to be a hero when your wings don’t work.

  Maybe they hadn’t truly forgiven me for abandoning them—for breaking the code of murder.

  And then one night, I may have put a few too many stones into the bottle, if you catch my cricket, and I’d been trying to convince Ghubari that I understood complicated things like Schrödinger’s cat and Higgs Bosom. Ghubari exhibited saintlike patience, gently suggesting we head back to Tavern on the Square since the sun was rising.

  I hopped over to where the orangutans slept, draped around filthy velvet furniture. Clone-like clusters of stripy cats and kittens had filled themselves in between woolly orange bodies. Orange snored gently while clutching an enormous stack of well-worn Victoria’s Secret catalogs. I beak-prodded him. Genghis Cat sprang into action, hissing at a stubby urn of Grey Poupon and then me once his eyes had adjusted.

  “Where’s Dee?” I asked. Orange hastily shoved his catalogs behind him and pressed on leathery knuckles to lift his great body, ginger cords trailing.

  “She…she was sleeping here,” he said. Green-cheeked conures woke and shrieked, rousing skunks and moles, amphibians, reptiles, and insects whose eyes became searchlights hunting for the unicorn they must have now felt they’d only dreamt of.

  Migisi was awakened by animal sounds, chittering in panic. She’d been asleep and hadn’t seen what happened to Dee.

  Ghubari looked at me with citrine eyes, feeling the knife slice of my terror. “A MoFo whose movements don’t wake a menagerie of creatures on high alert. She is quite miraculous…”

  I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said because my heart was pounding a jungle-drum alarm.

  Dee had vanished. Taken by a night filled with horror. By an enemy who wanted her for unspeakable things. And I was getting ready to tear the sun out of the sky.

  Footnotes

  1Rohan and Neera were Ghubari’s beloved MoFos.

  2Like scales, but way cooler.

  3Her hair was not like the MoFo band, but rather a literal flock of seagulls wrestling over
ramen.

  Chapter 17

  Matias

  Griffon vulture

  Añisclo Canyon, Spain

  Death tells us a lovely story. You know this, don’t you? Pay attention, my son; hear it in the snapping of sinew, see its slippery elegance in the bubbles of blood that escape from an open throat. These canyons have always been our home. The limestone cliffs, the icy retch of glacial waterfalls. Here the sun beats the faces of rocks. Tattling turquoise rivers mock the lush greenery. They claw at rock and swallow soil, a steady and stony slaughter.

  The One Who Hollows as well must return.

  We must always listen for death to tell its next story. It may sing a twisty song, percussive panting, and final notes. Undersong of the Underworld.

  Kettling in great warm loops under a cloud kingdom, Death summons us with a smell. The smell of a heart in stop. Snapped bones. Beatless blood. Last exhales. Shiny rivulets of freed fluid. A spill of soft, glistening organs. Escaped tongues. There is bluing, delicious dampness, new holes become new homes. An exquisite swelling. Brave, billowing gas and a piebald rainbow pleasuring the skin. Stiffen and soften, repeat. Death is the most impossibly beautiful transition. There is no sweeter smell. There is no greater calling.

  Falling in flight, we touch our talons to tenacious mountain grass. Among its gentle blades—sibilant sighs—it tells us the story of a rabbit. The grass knows what happened. The grass always knows. The rabbit has not been in Death’s lung long. Death’s sweet, sweet scent has called the others to her bidding. Blowflies—always female, happily ballooned—entrust the rabbit’s fulvous fur with their precious eggs. Bacteria mimic the river’s confidence, drenching themselves in glowing glory, changing Rabbit’s inner climate and welcoming the mighty families of Web. An army of ants has arrived, a great black river, invading the rabbit’s frozen eye, a sightless delicacy. We all dream of juicy marrow and the full-flavored strings of the heart. We wait to hear the birth of maggots, who buzz and shriek with joy, delighting in their great Feast Of Meats. They are at home in a palace of worms; they know they will go on to greatness. Below us, the greatest power of all—the fungi network, that great tentacled wonder. Pulsing with pleasure. We honor the almighty connectors of Web, the secret messengers of the soil, with the richest of the feast. And then we admire what is left, an astonishing art of bone, cartilage, and fur. Rabbit sustains a tiny Universe. An homage to life, the masterstroke of death. We all play our part in the music. Life and Death hold hands and dance.

  Death is certain, my son, as certain as your father and I knew you were ours when we found you, the lone porcelain sheen in a nest of crushed shell and yolky slime. Your father and I knew you were ours. A lady vulture had loved you, incubating you in a twiggy nest before her wings were ripped from her mantle, before something’s teeth yearned for her downy chest, leaving a gentle shower of taupe feathers. Another lovely story.

  We tell our stories again and again to remember, son. You will remember when the sweet scent summoned us, when we first laid eyes on that great pile of human corpses. You will remember how we touched down on the grass and they told us in a sharp whisper, “RUN.” You will remember how the smell was different, the sweetness cloying. You will remember how the sun pointed to the giant eggs that lay nearby, so close, too close, in buttery gleams. You will remember how we circled the five enormous eggs, unsure, vomiting our doubts, hopping and calling for answers.

  “Run!” screamed the grass.

  You will remember the first sharp crack in that colossal egg, like the sound of crunching spines. You will remember the strange, sick beast that bared its nakedness, its bluish skin sticky with gungy white fluid, its horrid, misshapen beak. Its one human eye—round and roving—pink as a fresh brain. It was hunting. We knew, already hunting. From shell but not of shell, with twisted limbs, sickly wings, and a craned neck. This creature, who shrieked in Death’s cold warning, is not in the dance, neither Life nor Death. These things do not share or give and so do not belong in a tiny Universe. You will tell this story again and again so that we all remember. We remember to run.

  Change is as constant as the shadows that lick and tease our limestone canyons. And when Death comes for us, we will be grateful for the chance to play in its generous spectacle. There will never be a greater honor.

  Death can be soft or sharp, a moment’s kiss or a hero’s odyssey. It can be quiet or colorful, violent as talons on soft-bellied fish or as stealthy as a long-leaved butterwort using its delicious stickiness to trap a gullible fly. Death has eyes and ears and that smell—that sweet, sweet smell. It is, in all its shifting ways, utterly magnificent. And the best part about Death is that it is all of ours to share.

  These canyons have always been our home. You, son, have always been our home.

  Chapter 18

  S.T.

  Bothell, Washington, USA

  I stood outside the crimson-bricked citadel of Tavern on the Square, life robbed of its nectar because my precious nestling had been taken from me.

  Use your head, Dee; it is the best advantage you’ve got, I thought, as if she could hear. Use your MoFo mind to survive.

  Snow was falling from the sky. The crisp morning air beaded with beautiful black bodies. My mind was mossy, running on fumes of fear. I hardly cared that I smelled like A Very Taki Tiki Bar’s urinals or that I was still molting and resembled an electrocuted echidna. My chest felt scalded. It’s hard to breathe when your heart has been stolen from your body.

  An inkwell’s spattering of crows stained the roof, magic carpet bushes, Narnia-esque lampposts, the stately corn dog silhouettes of sweet gums. Migisi watched me from the red building’s rain gutter. It was so unlike her to have fallen asleep while keeping guard of Dee, but I couldn’t criticize. To quote an infamous avian proverb about hypocrisy, “Birds on lofty boughs should be wary upon whom they shitteth, for they may endeth upeth on a less lofty one the following night and be shatteth upon themselves.”

  Crows touched down on the snow with dinosaur toes in battleship gray. I scanned for familiar features in satin silhouettes. Most of them were young—a crèche of crows—and I didn’t know them.

  Warning calls sounded out, the foretoken of corvids who were hyper aware of the enormous raptor on the rain gutter, but confident in their numbers. Migisi, ruffled, watched the inky invasion, her eyes narrow and vindictive like two escaped anal beads.

  And then a voice like cool water trickled from above. “S.T.!”

  She landed like sifted sugar, flashing the singed underside of her wing, a place where feathers could never grow.

  “Pressa.”

  “You look—”

  “Yes,” I said, standing before her like a Spirit Halloween wig that had been repeatedly brutalized by a Segway.

  “What has happened, S.T.?” She was shiny as latex, her eyes the last lambent coals of a dwindling fire. Four crows, each with large, sleek bodies and beaks that sloped into sharp points, touched down around her. Their heads darted back and forth as they took me in, assessing, sporadic wing flaps serving as warnings.

  “It’s okay,” she told them. “He is murder. This is S.T.”

  Sons, I thought. Pressa’s strapping sons. They hopped on anisodactyl feet,1 assessing the crow equivalent of a turd in with the Tostitos.

  Hundreds of black feathereds mantled the edifice. My neck strained from searching for the most beautiful crow of all, and the danger of these night watches dawned on me. Had something happened to Kraai? Guilt sat in my belly like a hunk of freezer-burnt venison. Heroes didn’t last long in a world like ours, and Kraai could never have changed who he was.

  The last crow fluttered from the sky, spilled confetti. We all watched the feathered embodiment of courage, a miracle dressed in black wings.

  “Kraai!” My voice was something ragged, a ship fighting through ice and rock.

  “Tell me,” he said, feeling panic pour from my plumage.

  “It’s Dee; she’s been taken.” I pointed my beak toward t
he red brick palace behind me. “Ghubari’s inside. He says you’ll help me.”

  There were a lot of things Kraai could have said to me, things about abandonment and the tangled fishing lines of friendship. How I’d fallen silent in the murder’s time of need. He said none of them. Instead, he peered right inside of me, right at the hole where my heart should have been, as though not a decade but a day had passed, and he said, “We will find her. We are the eyes in the sky.”

  Forgiveness is the ultimate act of strength. I bobbed my head in gratitude.

  “The last human can’t be difficult to find,” he told me as he gestured to hundreds of glistening eyes.

  “Don’t count on it,” I said, remembering Dee when she was several springs old, how she would crouch, blending in among bursts of monkshood, marsh marigold, cotton grass, and fireweed. How she learned to pad, soft as a lynx, evolving from the mistakes of a Sitka black-tailed doe—the twig’s crunch that gave her away. How she snatched fish from the water world with falcon-fast hands. How she learned the prickly lesson of patience, stalking me as I sipped from a fresh puddle. She pounced, snatching my body in quick pink fingers and laughed, a sound like raindrops pattering bluebells. How I told her she had to find a new practice subject unless we could locate a functioning defibrillator.

  Migisi dove from the rain gutter, snatching a talon full of snow and soil, unsettling the dark crowd. She lifted her clasped talons to investigate and revealed a tiny, panicked head. It was desperately trying to bite her with miniature, knifelike teeth.

  “Ach, let me…let me go!” He screeched, and she squeezed tighter. There were no protests. Really, no one felt compelled to challenge a raptor in the midst of an existential meltdown.