Betrayal is a hard, hot poker to the heart, quick scars and scalded soft tissue. I wanted to yell, “Shame!” and throw tomatoes at him, but there was no time for that. I’d had enough. I ran on, passing lonely houses that posed for the lake. Shadows blackened the pavement as bright birds chased me from the air.
“Hypocritical!” said Ghubari, slowing his flight to stay above a sprinting crow. “What about the rabbits, voles, salmon, and deer Dee has eaten to survive, the creatures she has destroyed? In nature there are always sacrifices—”
“Dee lives her life in gratitude of those gifts!” I screeched, my voice bumping along for the earthbound ride. “She’s respectful of nature! She receives gifts and gives them. She knows that in order for life to continue, she cannot overfish. She would never hunt the last salmon. It’s all a web of reciprocity; you know this, Ghubari, The Changed Ones don’t give back! They will obliterate the planet if no one stops them! Of course, some animals become prey—MoFos called it the circle of life, remember?! They held up baby lions as Elton John sang about it!” From shaggy arborvitaes, a pair of Steller’s jays watched a trio of parrots in pursuit of earthbound crows and questioned their fermented berry intake. “But The Changed Ones are dominating, hell-bent on destruction. This is not a natural balance.”
“Nature has always been building biological superweapons. This is not new.”
“Go away, Ghubari!” I was experiencing acute déjà poo—the feeling that I’d heard this crap before.
“What about the human hearts?” projected Ghubari as we navigated around a filthy old couch squatting in the road. “Those hearts are still in there somewhere! They still beat, Shit Turd!”
“I’ve made my peace with the extinction of the MoFos. It’s better that Dee is the last MoFo on earth than we allow them to continue as they are. What the hell has happened to y— No, I don’t have time for this. Dee needs help!” Here, I tripped over a stone and face planted, but we won’t dwell on that.
Ghubari was suddenly at my side, skimming the pavement with a perilously low flight. “It’s worth a shot! They are killing every living being, and if we don’t try, we will all be extinct. Shit Turd, The Changed Ones are mimicking the natural world, harnessing the powers of nature. I have seen them using the traits of animals, but what if, instead of returning to their humanity, they tap into those with the greatest powers of nature?”
That stopped me dead in my tracks. The parrots hovered above.
Hard bumps across my body told me he was right about one thing. There were much greater powers in nature, and I couldn’t think about what would happen if The Changed Ones adapted those.
Ghubari landed on the lakeside street with galling elegance. “It is better that we have them back, S.T.! It’s what you’ve always wanted!”
“Ghubari, you’re wrong!” Words I never thought I’d say, much less scream, tangy on the tongue. “Can you hear yourself—procreation with those monsters? We have to rescue Dee; we have to work together. If we stop caring about one another, then we’re no better than them. A great poet once said that ‘we’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got, it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not.’”1
Ghubari searched the vast caverns of his mind, finally at a loss. “That’s quite beautiful. I’ve never heard that poem before, S.T.”
“That’s a damn shame, Ghubari,” I said. “Now get the hell out of my way!”
I heard their parting wingbeats. I didn’t have time for my pending emotional meltdown; we had to find Kraai and figure out how to get Dee back without the herd of animals I was counting on. We were flying solo and unfortunately not flying at all. Suddenly, Tom Hanks dropped directly in front of Pressa and me with all the grace of a ripened coconut.
“Get out of my way, Tom Hanks!” I shrieked. “I’m going to find Dee!”
Tom Hanks splayed his white wings and cleared his throat. He projected beautifully, and suddenly, instead of a theatrical cockatoo, I saw a young MoFo actress, holding her audience. I pictured the youthful glow of her skin, hope and the light of a stage shining in her eyes. A MoFo with the bones of a bird, but the brave of a bear.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts2
Tom Hanks bowed his head, signaling deep respect, the feathers of his crest like bright yellow fingers.
“Look for the lake house with alive inside written on the roof. You’ll find help there; tell them I sent you,” said Tom Hanks in a hushed tone. He shared a mind map with Pressa by letting out a sharp squawk of sound. Before he vanished into a curtain of clouds, he sang, “The show must go on.”
And on it would.
“Can we trust him?” Pressa asked.
“What choice do we have?” I said, sensing we both felt that Tom Hanks was telling us the truth, that he’d never forgotten the young MoFo who’d taught him how to be an entertainer. Tom Hanks would have given his right wing to sing one last song with his MoFo. Pressa and I ran alongside lake houses that hugged Lake Washington. And then I stopped.
“Oh grubs, what is it?” whispered Pressa.
“That. Do you hear it?” I asked. A ghost of a sound. But I listened to the flutter and flare of my veins, the way little Dee had done since she first started to engage with the worlds around her. The way Dee knew to listen to the warning calls of a Turdus migratorius, how the trees rustled and tightened before a storm. Instinct. And while a large percentage of my insides told me I needed a Big Mac, a smaller part told me I needed to follow this sound. I took in the faces of lake houses, the mouths of their letter boxes rusted shut, front lawns choking on weeds.
Pressa lifted up into the sky, soaring over the roof of the lake house.
“S.T.! There is writing on the roof! MoFo letters! I think it might be the place!”
I heard the faint sound again and ran toward a battered fence.
“Bird your loins, Pressa!”
I heard Pressa mutter something about only understanding me a fraction of the time and then heard her hijack the wind above me as I squeezed in between a gap in the green wood planks and tore across the lawn—a great green labyrinth of sword fern and salal and wood sorrel—
“Shit Turd, careful! We don’t know what’s down there!”
And then I was leaping past a cobwebbed statue of a mer-MoFo and approaching the door, a hand-carved MoFo masterpiece in knotty alder. The door—a Haida scene of orcas in battle—had seen its own fight, a sharp scar rivering down to its base, ending in an estuary of a hole big enough for a handsome crow to fit through. I stopped, Pressa hovering above me. The springtails in my belly told me I was in the right place. I slipped in through the crack in the door.
It was strange to be inside. Dee never trusted the insides of houses—a ceiling meant she couldn’t read the sky. The once-modern lake house was spacious, dark. Dank wet smells slithered across old chairs and shelves, a tableau of MoFo life. Gaping windows surveyed Lake Washington, eerily calm as if reflecting a memory of glass. Old footprints told tales like the ancient etchings of a cave wall. I would describe the house’s decor as “bog nouveau.” The greedy salt smell of sex hung in the air. A definite sign of squirrel sexcapades.
“There, through the windows!” I launched myself through a gaping floor-to-ceiling window, and then Pressa and I were running beside patio furniture, across a stretch of grass, up to the placid waters of Lake Washington. And there, at the lip of the lake, was a waddle.
A waddle of Humboldt penguins. They had survived despite being zoo animals, and they had grown in their numbers. The younger penguins had less of the Humboldt’s signature pale salmon face mask, pink patches of skin that help the penguin stay cool in the warmer temperatures of their native Peru and Chile. I marveled; the Humboldts were adapting to the chilly Pacific Northwest.
“We are looking for the crows, please, have you seen them?” asked Press
a, our diplomat. “Tom Hanks sent us here!”
“Tom Hanks! We love Tom Hanks!” penguins honked excitedly.
“The Changed Ones took my fledgling!” I squawked, unable to help myself.
The penguins, like a rack of bowling pins decked out in evening wear, elected one penguin to come forward. The penguin with the largest pastel pink mask used spatula feet to waddle a few steps in front of the others and said, “The One Who Keeps! What a great honor to be in your presence! You are a legend!”
The penguins raised their little black flippers up and down, honking a kazoo’s chorus of joy.
I’d always felt that penguins were sophisticated and intuitive beings.
“I need help,” I told the spokes-penguin. “The Changed Ones have taken my—” I looked over at Pressa, whose eyebrows would have been in the stratosphere if she’d had any. “The Changed Ones have taken Dee, the last human. She’s everything to me. And she needs my help. I have to find her. I have to protect her.”
The penguins shuffled and shivered on the spot. “A Keeper! Alive! Alive!” they cheered. I felt their giddiness and an excited exhale from the surface of the lake. “We have heard of her! Yes! The Keeper who rides the sea wolves! Echo knows of her.”
“The seabirds speak of her!” honked the spokes-penguin.
“Yes! That’s Dee! Please,” I begged the penguin, suddenly motivated by a MoFo movie, “I’m just a crow, standing in front of a penguin, asking him to help me rescue the last human on earth.”
“We want to help! We want to help our kind!”
“Our kind?” I asked.
“Yes! Yes! Earth birds!”
Pressa had already gleaned their meaning and was raking at the grass with her toes uncomfortably.
“Grounded birds! Birds who cannot ride the sky!” clarified the cheerful seabird.
“I see,” I said, feeling a prick of self-consciousness. “I need to find the crows, I need allies; I’ve got to find out where The Changed Ones have taken Dee…”
“You need to travel fast,” said the main penguin, in the sounds of a smile.
“Yes!”
“Hoooooray!” cheered the waddle of penguins, hopping up and down excitedly.
“Come, come, come!” they all chanted. The penguins waddled up the unruly grass of the lawn, so tall they were barely visible. They stopped where the property line ended, where a fence lay in splintered fragments. Pressa and I stared at the neighboring lake house’s jungle of weeds and brush. The house was derelict. It wore a moss wig and a tired expression. It was slowly being digested by vegetation.
“Um…where?” I asked.
“There!”
Pressa and I squinted, darting our heads. There was nothing but bramble and a lively battle of sword ferns. Old prejudices began to rise up within me. What did these aquatic tampons know about anything? They were just strangers drowning in a strange land. Perhaps the happy-go-lucky thing was all an act, they were high on hope and herring. Maybe they’d all lost their minds in the quest for somewhere to belong.
“Our friend is one of us, an earth bird. Penguins are friends to earth birds and Echo birds.”
“I really don’t have time—”
The penguin raised his sugar-pink face to the sky and let out a honking bellow so loud I leapt into the air: “Come out!”
Brambles started to shimmy like the jingling hip scarf of a belly dancer. The first thing we saw was an enormous leg, the steely gray of a gun. Then three enormous talons.
A Changed One. A setup. I knew it! Those Oreo-colored butt plugs!
“No need to be shiverish!” the penguin said to me. “Come on, Budiwati, don’t be shy!” The penguins peeped and gurgled excitedly. With a swift stride, the rest of the being emerged, towering above us all at the height of a tall MoFo. Not a Changed One, but a striking reminder that every manner of creature camouflaged itself in the jungle of Seattle in order to survive. Things were hiding. Everywhere.
“Holy taquito…” flew out of my mouth.
I’d known Pressa for a very long time, and this was the first time I’d heard her swear.
“Oh, fucky!” she shrieked amidst panicked wing claps. She shot onto the top of a kayak shed. “What the ass shit!”
She wasn’t very good at it.
“Don’t run!” the main penguin warned Pressa. “Never run from her!”
“What the helly bitch is that thing there?!” said Pressa from the safety of stacked kayaks.
I stared, utterly mesmerized. “It’s…a dinosaur.”
“A what?” Pressa appeared to be having a panic attack. Her gular thumped like nightclub bass.
“I don’t understand,” I said to the head penguin. “How did it get here?”
“They,” said the penguin, and the gigantic bushes of evergreen huckleberry and red osier dogwood split aside, and out strode other impossibilities. Other enormous entities with towering necks and reptilian legs.
“We, the penguins, went up north, swam ourselves an adventure.” Here, the penguin described the area, and as he did, he released a babbling sound, a reverberation from Echo that strummed inside me. Its vibrations painted a picture—a port, I was sure of it, up north. Canada’s once-bustling Port of Vancouver.
“A great gray nest arrived at the Port of Vancouver—”
“Hoooray! Hooray!” honked the penguin posse.
“Keepers had put lots and lots of wild creatures into the floating metal nest. It sailed the waters from oceans away and made it to the port.”
“They made it! Huzzah!” honked a tiny penguin. More honking and flipper flapping ensued.
“That is how we came to know Tom Hanks! Tom Hanks arrived on the floating metal nest!” cried the spokes-penguin.
“Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah for Tom Hanks!”
“Not a floating nest,” I told them. “They called it a boat, or a ship, or a vessel.” A collective “Oooooooooooh” from the waddle.
A penguin shaped like an award-winning eggplant shouted, “The One Who Keeps! A genius!”
The head penguin continued. “They’d been at sea for a long time; the Keepers held on as long as they could. We greeted them—Welcome! Welcome!—as they released all the living beings onto land and tended to the sick and the ones with weak legs. But then…”
The penguins bowed their heads and mumbled, short huffs and honks. I could picture it. The MoFos had been in isolation for a long time. And then they weren’t. The virus worked swiftly.
The enormous being let out a Jurassic screech. Pressa’s eyes impersonated those of a Black Moor goldfish. The penguins leapt up and down. MoFos, I thought—always so very, very clever. A cluster of them had had the foresight to load up a boat with animals and send it out to sea. MoFos had even volunteered to chaperone. Suicide saviors. In an act of hope and faith, they really had built an ark.
“The earth birds look out for one another. She wants to help; they swam a long way to get here,” said the peppy penguin.
“They swam?” I asked, incredulous.
Pressa now had the stupefied look of a sheep who, while minding its own woolly business and chomping innocently on a clump of grass, suddenly remembered a nefarious past life. “I don’t know, S.T., I don’t know what she is; I’m still not even sure we haven’t been poisoned,” she said, breathless.
“Can she run fast?” I asked the penguins.
And then the dinosaur spoke. “Can he ask questions directly?” Her voice was as deep as Lake Washington, a guttural combustion with a tropical twang. A colossal gray leg swung out, those treacherous toes thumping down on the earth. The other leg crashed down after it as she strode toward the tiny crow and a cheerleading squad of flightless birds in formal attire.
“Can she run fast, tsk, tsk tsk. Faster than you can fly, little weed,” the enormous creature said to me. Her arched body—suspended on those gargantuan legs—was covered in a sumptuous shag of black hair, the cloak of a 1970s pimp. That great toe whomped down in front of me, and up close, I unde
rstood the terror of this specialized tool used for disemboweling. Suddenly, an enormous beak hovered close to my own. I was mesmerized by the electric turquoise of her bald, wrinkly head. Her face, an inhospitable mountain range, conjured images of another time, a time when giant reptiles ruled supreme in Aura, Echo, and Web. When the very first birds descended from theropods, the dinosaurs with three toes and hollow bones. A great bone helmet postured like a war weapon on the seat of her skull. Her intricately wrinkled neck started in stop-sign red, dribbling into two pendulous wattles that swung like ancient scrotums. She scrutinized me with orange eyes—burning planets. We both knew that in that moment, if she chose to kill me, nothing could stop her. One peck. A headbutt. Quick swipe of that lethal toe. Even her eyelashes were treacherous spikes of doom. I bowed to the towering tropical being of Australia and Indonesia, a primordial beast of a bird.
The cassowary.
She peered at me, burning planets flaring, this living fossil full of fight. I felt it simmering just under her cowboy-boot skin.
The cassowary’s creviced beak opened, snatched me by the wing, and flung me into the air.
And suddenly I was on the back of a fucking dinosaur.
Footnotes
1To be clear, the poet I refer to is the illustrious Jon Bon Jovi, who was a magnificent MoFo with the voice of a rose-breasted grosbeak and the hair of a Silkie chicken.
2These were beautiful words from a play by William Shakespeare, who was also known as the Bard, which I like to think was just a drunken Early Modern English pronunciation of “bird.”
Chapter 26
S.T.
Bothell, Washington, USA
Penguins cheered and clapped their flippers below. Pressa gawked at me with her beak open. I instinctually resumed my expert squat on top of Budiwati the cassowary, clutching lumps of the shaggy pimp hair of her back with my feet. Budiwati’s huge electric-blue head swiveled around to peer at me, suspended by her ophidian neck. The wide-eyed beak-to-beak inspection seemed like an infringement of my personal space, but I wasn’t sure what social etiquette was like on her tropical home islands of New Guinea. Or what on earth had happened there.
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