When the zebra came 'round again I picked it up, minding the sharp edges as its legs kept working mindlessly in mid-air. I set it on its side while I wrapped a winter coat around me and stepped into boots, then went outside. The raven and elephant and sheep and a couple of others had followed me, alarmingly, and I held the door open for them as they stumbled into the snow.
There were a fresh few centimeters on the ground, windswept into drifts and bare icy patches but overall still deep enough for footprints. I set the zebra into a clean patch and it took off again, slowly, etching its pattern into the snow. It encircled me, and I took a step back to view the outline as a whole. It had almost come around, and it looked like it had drawn a big-headed shark. Which was impressive but puzzling. And then the zebra took off at a tangent from the shark’s head, exploding upward in a spume of trampled snow, and—
“Whale Breath.”
#
They couldn’t talk, but I had my friends back. Sort of. Some of them obviously wanted to play, but others still seemed to want to trip me or cut me with their sharp bits.
I gathered up the friendlies one day, and we all made our slow way back to the hot springs.
The menagerie got all excited when we got there. The raven tried to jump right in, and would have if I hadn’t grabbed it. “I’m sorry,” I told it. “Water is no good for metalbirds.” You see, I had learned from the shark’s demise.
The various creatures were all emoting wildly at me. “I know,” I said, “it’s very exciting.” I stripped and slid into the water like a seal.
And instantly regretted it. Hot! Heat! Beyond hot, a feeling like all my skin was exploding, like I was being shocked all over. Pain, unreasonable pain. I flailed my arms, but they were so heavy, those fire-arms, burning even under my fingernails. I opened my mouth to scream, but I slipped under the water and the water shocked down my throat like molten lava. It filled my eyes and nose and ears, and then it was over.
#
For a few days everything was okay. My old friends ringed all around, and though we still couldn’t talk, I understood that they’d been trying to warn me about the spring. Oh well. Too late now. Móðir came 'round to the hot spring eventually, and screamed when she saw my body. It looked bad by then, shrunken and hairless and boiled red like a beet. But I didn’t mind. I felt I’d come home.
It didn’t last. I felt… sucked under. I dove into the hot spring and couldn’t surface. Down under the rocks through cracks I’d only ever plumbed with my toes, into the earth I went. Things were dark.
And then I woke up to a jumble of scrap metal and wires and gadgets and gizmos, and a face before me that made no sense—Magnús?—and maybe all of it had been a dream and I was in some kind of mad scientist hospital. There was móðir’s face next to Magnús’s, and I opened my mouth to ask her what had happened, but my mouth wouldn’t open, and I heard her tell Magnús, “Isn’t it marvelous? If my calculations are correct—” and I screamed louder than I ever have in my life, but it made no sound.
I had no mouth. I was a mechanical horse.
I couldn’t scream, but I could flail my strong limbs, which I did. They moved differently from what I was used to, but panic is panic. I knocked things over, hearing them clatter onto the workshop floor. Móðir and Magnús cursed as they jumped back from me, out of the way, and I wanted to hurt them. But they were my only hope, weren’t they? If I was ever going to escape, I’d need them to figure it out. I stopped thrashing.
The sound of Magnús’s laughter overwhelmed me, and for a moment, I dared to hope that he recognized me in there, somehow looked into the horse’s dead eyes and knew his sister’s soul, understood what would make a clockwork horse startle. “Yeah,” he said to móðir, “this thing will clearly solve all our problems.”
#
Móðir tried to turn me off, but I wouldn’t let her near the switch. I broke out of the workshop and followed Magnús around as much as I could, which wasn’t a lot. I could have busted into the house, but it felt wrong. It was still my home, after all. I overheard some things: Magnús’s obvious struggle with wanting to help móðir without giving up a promising career as the hvali kafbátur’s chief engineer; his intense hatred of the mechanical menagerie (including myself); my own funeral.
He cried. Big brother Magnús. Who would have thought?
Móðir kept making animals, even the toys that she’d said were for me. They seemed to know me, though I couldn’t have said who any of them were. At least the new ones were friendly. The ones who’d been hostile before—the elephant and monkey and alligator, and a few others—seemed to be getting worse. They’d peck at Magnús and wind underfoot like naughty kittens and cause basically as much mischief as five-kilo critters can.
My one goal was to make Magnús see me for who I was. I tried to write him a letter in the snow, but I couldn’t get my four feet to make anything but a mess at first, and then it didn’t snow for what seemed a long time—spring was on the way, finally. I tried nuzzling him, but he reacted with fear. I was, after all, a monstrous metal horse. I couldn’t even bring him things: I had no hands, no mouth.
One day I found him sitting in the small family graveyard. The earth over my body was still mounded, hard as winter. “I miss you, sis,” he said. “Faðir was one thing, but you too?”
He started as he heard me behind him. I wasn’t a graceful creature. “You again!” he shouted. “Get out of here, you awful thing. Get!” He picked up a stone and threw it at me, and I just barely ducked away. He picked up another. “I’m not kidding.”
And I flashed on a memory, an old memory of winters gone by. We always had the most fun with snowball fights: stagey, almost scripted reenactments of Viking battles with all his friends and me, the pesky sister, tagging along, and I always had the same role. I always died first, hammily, hugely, falling and writhing into mounds of soft snow.
Magnús threw a rock at me, and I let it hit me. It didn’t hurt any more than a snowball would have against thick layers of sweater and parka. Which is to say not at all—I was made of metal, after all! But I fell. My four legs didn’t want to let me, but I made them. I toppled over, not caring if I’d ever get up; I thrashed my legs in the air and rolled and then, suddenly and intentionally, went still as a corpse. It was the best I could do with no mouth to moan with.
Magnús was silent for a long time. He approached carefully, looking at me. My lidless eyes watched him, but I didn’t move a piston. Not until he was right on top of me, and then I twitched once more, scaring him so badly he tripped backward over a rock. Man, did I wish I could laugh.
He came up, eyes wide as saucers. “Askja?” And then I wished I could cry. I nodded and nodded my horsey head, and he hugged me despite my coldness, and maybe, I thought, it would be all right.
#
And it was, sort of.
Magnús and móðir worked together to engineer voiceboxes out of radio parts, and eventually all we monsters could talk again. Whale breath and the others still wouldn’t tell us their real names or their history, only that they missed the hot springs. We tried sending some of them back into the angry, now-boiling cauldron. But while it did soothe them, the effect was never very long-lived. The power plant sucked them right back out of the earth, and then it was anyone’s guess where they’d end up. We lost a few that way. I still miss them.
But the real tragedy was faðir.
It took us a long time to figure out why, but some of the toys—the earlier ones—just never came around. When Magnús and móðir gave them voices, they blabbered. They ranted and raved. They became even more murderous.
The only real clue was in snippets of things that felt like memories. The elephant would look at Magnús and say, “Proud of boating. Just like me.” And then it would pounce like a cat and leap on its stumpy legs and gore with its pointy metal tusks. But faðir had been a fisherman in his day, and surely he was proud of his son’s whaling.
The giraffe and the monkey would team up and u
se tools to trap us, but then they’d look at móðir and say, “just beautiful wedding day.”
We think they all were faðir. It seems the spirit can only be fragmented so much before it goes insane.
It makes me wonder, sometimes, what I might have lost.
We returned all the suspect toys to the springs, hoping maybe he’d be back, but if he has been it was only to illuminate lightbulbs, and we never noticed his particular light.
Magnús went back to the whale submarine fleet for a while but returned while still young, married, and raised your parents. He said he was afraid to die out there under the big sea, afraid that no part of his spirit would make it home if he did.
When he died, your parents really, really tried to stop Dreki Anda, to explain why that day’s power could not be allowed out through the transmission lines to every house and shop in the town. But the plant’s new owners were not “superstitious,” they said, and the people needed electricity.
I am sorry that the metal bird will never fly.
You are left with me and my silly old stories, and I know it’s not enough. At least móðir’s tinkering left me a bit cuddlier than I once was. Yes, it’s nice when you scratch my furry ears that way.
Yes, I will take you for a ride if you fetch your frænka Askja a fresh battery.
Where would you like to go?
***published in Ghost in the Cogs, October 2015
Story notes:
This was one of a shamefully small number of stories I was able to complete while working full-time as editor of a Norwegian newspaper. I was immersed from afar in Norwegian culture, but the story that came to me for the Ghost in the Cogs anthology call just would not work without massive geothermal power. So it would have to be Iceland.
Iceland is a truly enchanting country that I’ve been fortunate to visit twice. On my second visit, I even went to Elf School! It’s common knowledge in Iceland that other intelligences share the land with the island’s human inhabitants. I haven’t heard any Icelandic stories about steam ghosts, but if such things exist, that’s where they are.
Apology for Fish-Dude
Okay, so the Seizure Pox plague was bad. I mean, seriously. Whichever motherfuckers set that apocalypse loose deserved whatever the CIA and the FBI and the goddamn NSA or whoever could come up with. Homeland Security, maybe.
But there were only two words I could think of for the flying tigers and lions and shit: Fucking Hilarious. I wanted to be the genius who came up with that one.
You never really saw them in the city, except maybe flying so far overhead you could hardly tell what they were, but one time T-Rex showed me a vid on his wrist implant that had me laughing so hard I snorted water out my nose. You see through the window on one of the downtown monoliths onto the deck, and there’s this dog out there, a beagle I think, and you can tell whoever’s snapping the vid is messing with the dog because it’s looking right at you and dancing around like it wants to come inside. Then a flash of orange-y fur and the dog is gone. Gone. But the best part is the sound the dog makes. It’s like he doesn’t even have time to bark, and he just goes “oorf!” as he’s yanked up into the air.
Maybe it’s because we were goofy on CyBeans, but T-Rex and Koan and me were laughing about that damned dog all the way down to the lake. Oorf!
Koan was the one who turned us on to catfish noodling. He came from somewhere south, where before the Pox they used to noodle for fun, apparently. I did it for food.
The spot we liked best was out by the old water cribs. Once, my mom had told me, the lake reached almost to the tops of the cribs. Water from the top would go down through them, into huge pipes under the lakebed, and to the city. Now they were useless and spooky, standing ridiculously tall out of the shallow water like a pair of crumbling fairy tale towers. Maybe the spookiness is why no one was ever out there by them. I couldn’t figure any other reason, because there were almost always fish there.
As usual, T-Rex was the first one into the water, stomping in without even taking off his boots. “Here, fishy-fishy,” he called, peering down into the water in the predatory way he now had. “Hey,” he said, looking up at me and Koan still taking off our shoes and jackets, “who wants to bet I catch the biggest one?”
We just nodded, pretending we thought T-Rex was funny. I, for one, was so jealous of his new infrared/UV-enhanced eyes that I wanted to pry them out of his face.
So we spread out around the cribs looking for the lakebed holes where catfish lived. What you do is stick your hand into the hole until a catfish bites it. Then you pull the fucker out of the water and go to shore, and then you can maybe knock him off with something, or else their bites relax once they air-drown. I swear, it’s the weirdest thing in the world, but it worked. So whatever.
Except it wasn’t working for me that day. I saw psychedelic colors and geometric patterns in the water and the blue spring sky and written on my own skin, but I didn’t see any fish. I could hardly even spot their holes. And even when I did find one, let me just add: nothing makes you feel like a ‘tard faster than crouching in the garbage and muck of Lake Michigan with your fist in a hole waiting for a fish to fucking swallow it.
Koan had waded out farther to the north, using his other trick. He’d sit in the shallow water like he was meditating or something, and wait for a trout to come to him. I don’t know why they did, if he had some secret bait or something. But then he’d tickle the trout’s belly and the fish would sort of go to sleep and he’d just pluck it out of the water. Koan was a strange duck all right. He could’ve had any body mod he wanted, but all he got were some old-fashioned tattoos of Asian writing on his face and arms. They weren’t even luminescent or chameleoskin.
Anyway, the sun hadn’t even come close to the tops of the monoliths when T-Rex and Koan quit. Koan only had one trout in his bag, or else he probably would’ve shared with me. T-Rex had a whole bag of catfish, plus a salmon he’d snagged with one of his forearm spikes. It was more than he could eat by his stingy self, but I knew he’d sooner throw them to the flying kittens than share with me, so I was no way gonna ask him. They left me knee-deep in the greasy lake with my empty bag on the shore, T-Rex shouting “we are the champions!” as they went. Sometimes I hated him.
Another hour passed, or maybe two, and I’d gotten desperate enough to wade far out where I’d have to dive under the water to get to the holes. I’d never been so far out before. Finally I found a spot with some boulders under the water and a little while after I got there I finally glimpsed a fucking fish. It was just hanging out next to a boulder, rather than in a hole, so I thought I’d try Koan’s tickling trick. I snuck up on the fish, standing on the boulder above it, and slowly reached out and touched it by the tail. That was when I noticed it wasn’t a trout or a catfish. It was some kind of pretty fish, like one of those fancy-finned Japanese goldfish people used to keep as pets, only big. It was as long as my arm, with shiny orange and yellow scales and long wavy fins. The fish didn’t dart away when I touched its belly; it just flicked its flashy tail and stayed where it was. After a while I felt it go rigid, and as quick as I could I grabbed it and wrestled it out of the water.
So I was standing on a boulder, far out into Lake Michigan, soaked but feeling triumphant, almost legendary, hugging the fish to my chest.
And then the stupid thing had to go and talk to me.
“Hey kid,” he said, and I was so startled I almost dropped him right back into the lake, end of story.
His voice was totally human. Maybe a little on the high side, but not, I dunno, fishy. “Put me back in the lake and I’ll make it worth your while.” His mouth opened round and wide when he talked, like an O.
I couldn’t really think of what to say. I mean, I’d never talked to a fish before, no matter how many CyBeans or SuperX tabs I’d taken. But I was thinking that if someone had figured out how to stick furry wings on a lion and make it fly, a talking fish didn’t seem so impossible.
“Yeah?” I asked. “Like
how?”
The fish’s long pectoral fins moved against my chest, pushing with surprising pressure. They were almost like little arms. “Like however you want,” the goldfish said. “Whatever you wish for.”
I thought for a minute about all the sweet body mods I couldn’t afford on the money I made slinging for T-Rex. I thought about the monoliths, the sorts of people who lived in them. I thought about girls. I thought about the file under my bed: GED study guides, Northwestern and UIC-UC application forms, financial aid forms. Ultimately, though, I shrugged. How much could you ask of a goldfish? I set him down in the water in front of me, and he swam in a happy circle before looking back up at me with his spherical dark eyes.
“So what’ll it be?”
“Naw,” I said. “You go on with your life, little fish.” I looked around at the flat lake in front of me and the sun setting behind the monoliths on shore. “I just wish I had something for mom and me to eat for dinner.”
“No worries, kid,” he said. “Go on home to dinner. Catch you on the flip side.” The fish raised a fin to me before he turned and swam out into the lake, leaving a rippling wake behind him.
#
The shanty town east of Lakeshore Drive had been officially closed down a few years back, after the Seizure Pox ran its course and the city’s buildings sat half-empty. But they hadn’t got around to bulldozing it yet, and so it still crouched there against Millennium Park and the rest of the city, between the monoliths and the shrunken lake.
Those days the only folks there were the homeless kids who ran away from the orphanages, a few tramps and squatters who poached from the allotments and farms, the Docs, drug dealers, and various other nogoodniks like myself. I was born down there, in the luggage compartment of a stripped greyhound bus. I walked by the bus on my way home, patting the grey dog for luck. Mom used to tell me stories about that dog when she ran out of books to read me, heroic stories where the little greyhound pup always grew up to achieve his dreams. I hadn’t heard any of those in a while, though.
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