Strange New Feet

by Shannon Esposito

  “Yes, this is a human trait. We love, we feel compassion. But the question is, are we alone in this ability to love? And the answer is—we just don’t know, and even if we can attribute such things as love and culture to this chimera child, the fact remains that she is genetically both human and ape. ”

  Safia closes her eyes and presses her fist against her forehead. She doesn’t like where this is going.

  “In the end, when all is said and done, this is the only fact that we can stand on. Humans have defined humanity by DNA alone, no other criteria can be 100% proven to support our division from animals. Every other argument we may come up with is all speculation. We don’t know what goes on the minds of our closest genetic relatives. We don’t know if they are self-aware, if they are conscious of their own thoughts, capable of reasoning. Do they feel emotion the same as we do…or does any of this even matter for the purpose of this debate? “The fact is we created the dividing line between us modern humans and the rest of the bipedal primates by genetics alone.

  “Humans and bonobos share kingdom, phylum, class, order, family…only separating at genus. Humans are in the genus Homo while bonobos are in the genus Pan. Is it possible for Olivia Barnes to reside in one genus and not the other, when she stands clearly with one foot in both? The answer is no, it is not possible.”

  Safia is shaking her head. She is numb. She can feel the others in the room glancing at her.

  “Therefore, it is the decision of the Council that she should not be declared human. That to do so, would do injustice to her bonobo genes, and it would be ignoring a real part of her heritage.”

  There are gasps and whispers in the room. Safia hears them from a distance, from the distance grief puts between the griever and the rest of the world. Olivia will not be protected. She will not be released. It doesn’t seem possible.

  “We have in turn, concluded that, in light of this new intermingling of species, a new genus should be created: Homo Paniscus. The chimera known as Olivia Barnes is declared the first of this genus. Because of the novelty of this situation, it is recommended she be kept in quarantine until a reasonable answer to the danger she poses can be fully assessed. The rest of the regulations and laws governing Homo Paniscus will have to be written.” He pauses, his tone softening.

  “Also, I would like to add, that in denying Olivia Barnes human status, we hope that as the laws are written, the lawmakers will not deny her—or those that may come after her—the right to a dignified life. In the Preamble to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it states that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.’

  “We believe this declaration should be extended to Homo Paniscus. We believe that because we have evolved the ability to act morally, to form the concept of ethics, to understand the difference between right and wrong, we have an obligation to extend fair and just behavior to other forms of life that we share this planet with. There has been enough discrimination in our history that we don’t need to imagine the consequences of choosing it over a peaceful solution.” His head drops as he straightens up and then returns his gaze to the camera. “As the fate of the human-chimera ascends onto the public and drifts back into the world’s courtrooms, we have faith that the essence of humanity, the concept of dignity and the importance of peace will be the guiding lights. Thank you.”

  *******

  “How can I face her now?” Safia wipes at her cheeks with an open palm and turns from Olivia’s prison window to Rita. Luckily, Olivia is sleeping and can’t see the devastation in her tears. “What am I going to tell her? I promised her I would get her out of here. I promised her she could come home with me.”

  Rita still looks shell-shocked. Her face is pale as she stares at Olivia’s still body in the cot. Her mouth opens and then closes. She shakes her head. “Poor baby,” is all she can manage.

  “It can’t end like this. I can’t believe it can end like this.” Safia whispers. She feels like she is praying, pleading to whoever is in charge of things to rewind and change the outcome of Olivia’s fate. “Please…it can’t end like this.”

  “Come on, it’s late,” Rita finally says, taking Safia’s hand. “Let’s get some rest and we’ll figure something out in the morning. We won’t give up, okay? There’s got to be something else we can do.”

  Safia nods, knowing there’s nothing more she can do tonight. She kisses her palm and presses it against the window. “Goodnight, Olivia. I’m so sorry, but we won’t give up. I won’t give up until you are free.”

  Chapter 32

  Morning comes after a long stretch of darkness, after fits and starts of sleep. It creeps into her bedroom, slowly moves across the floor, across the bed to illuminate all the shadowy places.A fresh wave of grief rolls through her as she blinks, opens her swollen eyes and remembers the ruling. Her heart immediately starts pounding with anxiety. She pushes herself off the bed quickly, before the consequences of the ruling can set in. She doesn’t have to be at the hospital until later this afternoon, but she wants to make some calls, see if she can drum up any support for a petition. She takes a quick shower, makes strong coffee, and opens the curtains to let the morning sunlight filter in. It looks like it’s finally going to be a day without rain.

  She checks her phone. There’s a message from Dr. Brennan. It just says: it’s happening today.

  Safia sits gingerly on the edge of the couch, staring at the message. It’s happening. They are taking Olivia away for safe keeping. She doesn’t know where or when she’ll ever see her again. The full weight of defeat crushes her. She can’t move or think what to do next.

  Her phone vibrates in her hands. She is still staring at it. There’s an incoming call from her mother. She answers it stiffly.

  “Hello, Mom.”

  “Safia, honey,” her mother’s voice is raw and watery and has an edge that makes her immediately apprehensive.

  “What is it?”

  There is another call coming in, she glances at the screen. It’s Rita.

  “Safia, have you heard from anyone at the hospital yet?”

  She is beginning to panic, something is terribly wrong. “Rita is trying to call me now.”

  “Turn on the news.”

  She does and as the screen comes to life, her heart literally stops. What the…? Frantically, she turns up the volume. There is her hospital, Pineview Medical Center, being shot from above, from a helicopter it looks like. The camera zooms in to side of the building where black smoke is seeping slowly out of the building and swirling in the wind. She is trying to hear what the reporter is saying over the thump thump thump of the blades as the camera shakes and zooms in to a different scene, the front entrance where police and fire trucks have cordoned off the area and are swarming like ants in and out of the hospital.

  She catches the only words she needs: “…apparent bombing.”

  She begins to shake and hangs up the phone without saying goodbye.

  *******

  The streets are packed with press trucks as the cab stops a few blocks from the hospital.

  “I’ll walk from here.” She jumps out and runs down the sidewalk, feeling like she’s moving in slow motion, her legs shaking, her breath coming in heavy gasps. When she finally makes it, tears are blurring her vision. There are still police cars and fire trucks parked along the emergency entrance. She flashes the officers her badge as she enters, whether she needs to or not, she just doesn’t want to be stopped. She stands in the entranceway, leaning over, trying to catch her breath.

  “Safia!”

  Rita is waiting for her.

  “Oh, Safia,” she is crying hard. The kind of crying that happens at funerals. Dr. Ackers is coming down the hall toward them, his pace like a man about to break out in a run. There are policemen with notepads talking to people everywhere.

  “Rita, what…happened?” Now Safia i
s really beginning to panic. Something is horribly wrong. Rita is shaking her head. Her hand is covering her mouth.

  “I have to go see Olivia,” she turns and tries to get in the elevator.

  Rita grabs her hand to stop her. “Safia…I’m so sorry.”

  Safia turns, looks into her eyes and comes face to face with the truth. Something has happened that is so irreversible, so life-changing, all that’s left to do is grieve. The only thing that makes people grieve in a hospital is death. Everything else is treatable. And death by bombing? There was only one person, one little girl there that was hated that much. But it couldn’t be true. It was unimaginable. She starts to shake her head. “No, no, no, please, God…no,” she whispers.

  “I’m so sorry. She didn’t make it,” Rita is shaking and trying to hold on to Safia’s hand tighter.

  Safia lets her purse fall and stands there frozen. This can’t be true. It can’t be. They must have made a mistake.

  “No,” she says, picking up her purse and almost passing out again. She falls against the wall and slides down it, holding her head. “No, they’ve made a mistake. Not Olivia. They’re taking her out of here today…to a safe place.” Dr. Ackers is now kneeling down beside Rita. His face holds the same horror, the same grief. It must be true. “Oh my god…oh my god…” she screams. She can’t stop screaming. There is too much grief, too much rage, too much injustice. It can’t be handled within one moment, within one small human body. It escapes from her lungs on her voice and shakes the building. At least, that’s what she imagines, the building rumbling, an earthquake riding on her screams, shaking the earth, the sky, the very foundation of reality because life has ceased to make sense, to have order or meaning.

  She feels Rita and Dr. Ackers wrapping their arms around her, crushing her. Her mouth is pressed against Rita’s shoulder and hair, her tears and saliva darkening Rita’s auburn strands.

  She opens her eyes. The metal elevator is in front of her, but in her mind she is staring at the gods of fate.

  “It can’t end like this. Her life can’t end like this!” she screams at them.

  Chapter 33

  The funeral is held on Friday and it is kept small and private. There is no casket, the murderer made sure of that. There is only a plain mahogany box holding the remains of Olivia’s beautiful, unfinished life.

  Rita’s statement of ‘she didn’t make it’ turned out to be an understatement. Actually, the bomb was so powerful, so efficient that there were only bits of Olivia left intact. They had to identify her remains with blood samples, finding the bonobo genes to be sure it was her. It was a well planned attack. The cameras had been disabled and the nurse had been called out of quarantine on an emergency call from her daughter, which turned out to not be a call from her daughter at all, but she was grateful to be alive, none-the-less. Strangely, Olivia’s blue bear was found in the hallway, singed and missing a leg. Safia did the best she could to repair it.

  Safia now sits in the front row on a small metal chair, flanked by her mother and sister, clutching the surviving bear to her heart, her knuckles turning white with the effort. They are all dressed in black. Black is the color of grief. Black is the color that absorbs all frequencies of light. Grief is the emotion that absorbs all frequencies of hope.It is appropriate.

  The Director had asked her if she wanted to say a few words about Olivia, but she declined. What was there left to say? Her life had been split open, made public by fearful vultures and then closed up and brought to an end just as cruelly. Besides, she had a hold on the spasms of grief at the moment, distancing herself from her own mind, but if she had to crawl through the fog to find Olivia’s face, her haunting green and brown eyes, so she could talk about her, she knew the grief would seize her and make her go mad.

  To her surprise, there are eventually a few people from the hospital who stand and say some kind words, offers of prayers. One of them is the main nurse who was assigned to Olivia. She isn’t the cold, prison guard Safia has imagined her to be. Her face is now drawn and patchy from crying. Safia is grateful for her pain. It means she saw Olivia as someone worthy of caring about. Why couldn’t everyone see her this way? She would never understand.

  People pay their respects and disperse quietly into the chilly afternoon. There will be no burial. Safia has asked to keep the urn and no one has objected, but she rides to the cemetery with Kat, Reuben and her mother anyway. She needs to talk to Sue.

  It’s a silent ride through the city and out into the open countryside and they let her get out and find Sue’s grave alone. The earth is spongy from days of rain, the sun-speckled pathway is crumbling and absent in some stretches. She finds Sue’s headstone eventually, kneels down and brushes off some wet leaves that have glued themselves over the date of her death. A vivid memory flashes through her mind of that day, too. Another day a senseless act of violence took a life, took a person she loved from the world. She then places Olivia’s urn gently against the headstone, drops her head and lets her tears fall into the mound of earth beneath her.

  “I don’t know if you can ever forgive me, Sue. I failed you. I failed Olivia. I couldn’t keep her safe.” The wind picks up and whips her hair against her lips. She pushes it away, barely noticing. “What I came here to say, besides I’m sorry, is that I want you to know that I loved her. I love her still, like a daughter and I will always keep her with me. There is a hole in my life now, in the shape of your beautiful daughter. I can’t believe she’s gone.” She lets herself remember their faces, she sees their smiles. “I will love you both, always.” This is her prayer, her promise. The only promise she knows she can keep. She lets Olivia rest up against her mother for a long time and then, when she can no longer feel her fingers, and her tears have lessened, she leans over, kisses Sue’s tombstone and tucks the urn back under her jacket.

  Chapter 34

  Safia sits alone, cuddling her legs to keep warm at Fern Park. The days have peeled away slowly, painfully and it’s the middle of November now. The emptiness is still there. She finds herself in her mind, wandering into the newly built quarantine hall and standing in front of the new window, hoping that Olivia will magically appear, that she can go in and scoop her up and steal her away like she should have done in the first place. The emptiness, the missing her, and the guilt are most profound in these moments.

  The ground beneath her is frozen and rock hard. The trees are naked, stark gray, their sharp fingers reaching up into an equally stark gray sky. She’s on leave from the hospital. Since Olivia’s death, she finds it impossible enough to concentrate on where she is going when she leaves her apartment, let alone being able to reach the level of concentration necessary to do her job. She had hoped that sitting here in the park would calm her, would cool off some of the anger and frustration pumping through her veins. Then, sometimes she wonders if that isn’t the only thing keeping her broken heart beating anyway.

  Her mother had made her promise she would work on finding peace again. She made her promise not to reinforce the pattern of anger by feeding it, by acting on it. All you have to do today is breathe. She takes in a lungful of cold air, exhaling slowly. A single bluebird lands on a broken branch to her right.

  “What are you doing here? Are you lost?” she whispers. The bird ruffles his puffed brown and blue body and cocks his head in a tiny jerking motion. “Yeah, I guess you could ask me the same thing, eh?” A little chirp and he takes flight.

  Sighing, Safia pushes herself off the frozen ground, stuffs her hands into the deep pockets of her coat and makes her way slowly down the hill and onto the bricked sidewalk. Along the way, she stops and picks up a penny. As she’s bending down, she notices a single daffodil bloomed next to a bench, its yellow head bent toward the ground. In November? she thinks.

  By the time she enters her apartment building, her face is wind burnt and her toes are numb, but she does feel calmer. Sometimes just watching one foot step in front of the other for hours is all you can do.

  P
lus, there were little gifts offered unexpectedly along the way, like the bluebird and the man who stepped out of Burt’s Coffee Shop in front of her and handed her a steaming cup of hot chocolate. It’s my good deed for the day, he had said. I wanted to make a stranger smile. She had smiled, for the first time in weeks, and thanked him. Sipping from the Styrofoam cup as she walked through the shopping district somehow made her feel not so alone, as if the universe itself had wrapped around her for comfort.

  Something is up, she thinks, some pattern is forming, but she can’t figure it out. Not until she gets to her apartment door and realizes it’s not locked.

  Cautiously, she pushes the door open wide and peers in.

  “Hello, Safia.”

  She stands there for a moment in her own doorway with so many emotions assaulting her at once that she can’t decide how to react. Slowly, she enters, takes off her coat and closes the door behind her.

  “What the hell…how did you get in here?” she throws up her hands. Anders is sitting at her table, a computer opened up in front of him. “You know what,” she says, moving into the kitchen and pouring a glass of water. “Just forget it.” She comes back out with the glass and stares down at him, feeling her face flush with…with what? She searches her mind frantically. Anger? Yes, definitely anger but something else, too. Something she won’t allow herself to recognize. It’s that warmth, that sense of happiness that shouldn’t be there. Her own feelings are betraying her.

  “Safia,” his eyes are searching hers, and his tone is so tender that she has to stop him before she loses a grip on her anger.

  “No,” she holds up her hand. “You answer my question first. How could you let her die?” Yes, this is the question she hasn’t let herself ask, because it does too much damage, causes too much guilt, too much pain. “How could you save me…and not her? She was the one you were supposed to be protecting. Not me.” She falls into the chair beside him. “She was just a child, Anders and you abandoned her! You should have been there to stop them.” She searches his face for some kind of remorse, but he is so calm and open, his eyes aren’t moving from hers. He is ready to take whatever she needs to dish out.