Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  Joan cannot feel any other parts of herself, but she can feel her leg, the pain shooting up to her hip, and she keeps tripping. Still she runs, and nothing looks familiar, but just as the panic is making itself known, she sees the hanging spider through the trees—only a formless, glowing blob—and she makes her way to it. She calls his name, softly, slowing. She is ten feet away. Five feet away, calling his name again.

  No one answers.

  “He was here?” says Kailynn.

  “He’s here,” Joan says.

  She comes to the spider and reaches out, tapping one of its legs, making it swing. She is sure that it is the same spider. She scans the woods—the shrub, which one was it?

  There. She thinks it is there.

  The gunfire is slowing in the distance, like popcorn nearly done.

  She runs to the bush, but somehow she is crawling, and by the time she can touch the branches, her head is on the ground and her knees are digging into the dirt. She lifts the branches and peers underneath.

  He is not there.

  “Lincoln? Lincoln?” she calls anyway, not able to look away from the empty dirt and the empty branches, the space where he is not.

  “Lincoln?”

  She means to say it louder, but her voice is not working. Back on her feet, she starts in one direction, stops, and tries a different one.

  She cannot think of how to look for him. She has no pattern to follow. He never wanders off. He always holds her hand. She lost track of him only once, at the fair, and she found him in thirty seconds.

  “Lincoln?” she whispers, getting softer instead of louder.

  “Lincoln!”

  She screams it. Suddenly her voice is working, and his name rings out loud and long, and she does not care if anyone hears her. Kailynn is calling for him, too.

  Her boy has listened to her too well. Wherever he is, he is not making a sound. She was so sure that he was too scared to venture out, but she has misjudged him and now what?

  There are possibilities she will not consider.

  She does not have to consider them as long as she keeps moving.

  She settles on running in circles, wider and wider, around the shrub where she left him. She falls forward and lands hard on her hands. She picks herself up.

  Joan looks under bushes and reaches toward every waving branch, and she passes the spider again, dangling, and she passes twenty trees that look just alike, and there is a stump, hollowed out, and there is a long shroud of ivy draped over a sapling. There is a hanging plastic ghost, unlit, bell-shaped.

  She stops, shifting her feet, and she can tell something is not right. She reaches down and realizes that blood is covering her toes. But she does not feel it, so it doesn’t matter.

  Kailynn is still somewhere nearby, calling his name.

  Joan focuses on the ground, which once seemed like it was the same patch of leaves and dead wood repeating itself endlessly, but now that she is staring at it, she can see the details separate themselves. There is enough moonlight to see mushrooms and a swathe of monkey grass. A popped balloon with the string still attached. A plastic witch’s cauldron, overturned, crooked. A lone string of white lights cutting through the darkness. She avoids the light and lifts the branches of a willow tree. She passes the ivy-covered sapling again, and she pulls the ivy apart. It is dense—impenetrable—no chance of him.

  There is no word for what she feels pushing up through her rib cage, pulsing. It is like a scream but with fists and claws. She will not let it out.

  She sees the glowing spider again, now only a vague shape in the trees. She looks back over all that she has passed, and there is the pointless string of white lights, and she sees a clump of what might be dead wisteria. She steps toward the wisteria, which is wide enough to conceal him. Off to her left is the witch’s cauldron again, and this time she sees what she did not see the first time.

  She yanks herself to a stop.

  The cauldron is crooked in a way that means it might have something underneath it. In a way that might mean it is caught on a small ankle or foot.

  I’m a turtle, I’m a turtle, I’m a turtle.

  She thinks of him hiding under an ottoman, his head peeking out.

  She knows she is right even before she lifts the cauldron—she knows she has followed some pale thread from her brain to his. There are a million of these threads between them, brain to brain, and the threads tell her when he is getting hungry and when he is about to cry, and they tell her that he will like the idea of using marshmallows for a tiny astronaut’s boots. Sometimes the threads get twisted: after all, they told her he would stay under the bush. But this is a perfect thread, soft and warm like Sarge’s fur and silver like Thor’s helmet—and the thread leads her to him.

  She holds up the cheap plastic cauldron with one hand, and underneath it he is curled into a ball like a roly-poly. It is the same position she remembers from tornado drills when she was a girl. He has his arms tucked around his head, and he does not look up.

  She tosses the cauldron to the side. She drops to her knees.

  “Lincoln?”

  “Mommy,” he says, looking up at her, smiling, and again her body is not working. She cannot even reach for him, and then he is moving, and that lets her move, too. She grabs him under his arms and drags him through the leaves, and he is against her, so warm. So solid and heavy.

  The screamlike thing inside her evaporates at the feel of him, dissolving back into air and blood and bone. She runs a hand over her son—he sounds calm enough, but his face is damp.

  “Do you know what I was?” he asks against her ear.

  She cannot say it at first. She swallows.

  “A turtle,” she answers.

  “Yes!” he whispers, ecstatically, burying his hands in her hair. “Why are you so wet?”

  He pulls his hands from her soaking hair. She captures his hand in hers, and she wraps herself around him, and she is cold to the bone and she has maybe never been so relieved.

  “I fell in the creek,” she says.

  “Oh. What are those noises? Guns? More guns?”

  She has almost stopped hearing the guns.

  “The police are here,” she whispers. “Why didn’t you answer me when I was calling?”

  “I didn’t hear you. I was disappeared.”

  She pushes herself to her feet, and she holds his hands because she is not sure she can pick him up. They should go back to the front of the zoo, maybe—surely whatever was happening there has finished.

  “He’s okay?” says Kailynn, coming up behind them, out of breath.

  “Yeah,” Joan says, taking a step. “He’s fine. Come on.”

  She notices the leaves in Kailynn’s hair as the girl falls into step beside her.

  “What’s wrong?” Kailynn says.

  Joan doesn’t know why the girl is asking, but then she notices that she is on her knees again. She is confused, at first, by the damp feel of the ground.

  She hurts.

  She has heard people say they do not feel getting shot—who has said it? Someone real or pretend? She can feel it now. It reminds her of when her father accidentally slammed her hand in the back door when she was small—he didn’t know she was behind him—and the pain was so big that she could not feel where it started.

  Kailynn is grabbing at her hand, pulling. Joan looks down and sees that the blood is coming so fast from her leg that she can watch it pool on the ground.

  Kailynn stops pulling at her.

  “Oh,” the girl says, her face so close. Her fingers turn gentle. “Oh.”

  Joan touches her side, and her side is wet, too, and she cannot make her legs move. But she can also hear that there are still footsteps in the woods, not distant enough, and she is not sure if the gunfire has really stopped.

  It is not safe to stay here
.

  “Take him,” she says to Kailynn, nodding at Lincoln. “Head back toward the exhibits. Sit somewhere and wait until the police come to help you.”

  She likes that image. Not the shadowy policemen in the woods but a solid, safe wall of uniformed men and women, guns disappeared. They will tell her son this is over. They will make him safe. They will find Mrs. Powell and tend to her knee, and they will check every nook and cranny and trash can. They will lift up a baby and find a mother, and of course the baby and the mother will be together again. Of course that must be the ending.

  Lincoln is holding tight to her with both hands.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head, wide-eyed. “No.”

  “Go on,” she says to him, and she shoves him away from her. Then she pulls him back because she can’t help it, can’t just let him go without holding him again first. She is on one knee, with the other leg stretched behind her. She wraps her arms around him and presses her face to his temple, and she breathes in the scent of him, which is always changing and the same and now is something like bread. She tries hard to make every cell in her body remember this—his hand in her hair, soft skin stretched over cheekbone, mommy—so that if she can keep anything with her for always, it will be the feel of him like this.

  “You’re my boy. Go with Kailynn.” No, she realizes, that is not fair. He needs more than that. He needs to understand. “I need to wait here, sweet. For now. Until there are doctors.”

  He is crying.

  She makes herself let go of her son’s fingers, makes herself let go of him entirely, even though she cannot stand the moment when his skin is a separate thing from her skin.

  “I want to stay with you,” he says. Kailynn is reaching for him, taking his hand, threading their fingers together. He goes with her, saying “okay” in that trembling way he has, but her head goes wavy. She loses track of things for a long blink, and then her eyes are open again.

  The lights strung through the trees are beautiful to her now. She does not know how she didn’t see it before. They are long ropes of white, like pearls or moons, and there is a ball of bright orange in the distance and red and blue lights flashing somewhere, reflecting off the trees.

  She is still on her knees. No, on her stomach. She will get up soon, but for a moment she watches Lincoln run, holding Kailynn’s hand. He is moving more quickly than she expected, his usual graceless run that she loves, his feet flying up sideways. He is not fast, not linear, but every part of him is moving—shoulders and feet and hands and elbows, heading off in every direction. He is not built for aerodynamics, her boy.

  She tastes blood. Maybe she has bitten her lip again.

  He looks bigger the farther away he gets, and she is aware enough to realize that this is not right. But he is filling up the screen in front of her, blotting out the swooping branches of the pines. There is only him. And the lights. Bright lights spreading through the sky like ribbons on the Maypole when she was in sixth grade in her lavender dress and she looked up at the ribbon she was holding, long and winding—Pay attention, girls, said Mrs. Manning, who was in charge of the whole ordeal, this is tricky—and she wove her ribbon together with the others, in and out, and the sherbet-colored ribbons filled up the sky, and at the end of every ribbon, a pair of hands holding tight—Kailynn’s fingers twisting in her shirt, Kailynn’s hand in Lincoln’s, ribbons winding—and that is what the lights are like now. Beautiful.

  There are beautiful things. Pay attention.

  Her hair has fallen into her mouth, and she jerks her head. The ground under her is damp.

  Lincoln. She doesn’t know where he is. She needs to lift her head.

  She loses track again, and then, when she turns her head, she catches a glimpse of him from a distance, his messy curls, and he is surrounded by people in dark clothes, down on their knees. It is nice when grown-ups make an effort not to tower over him. But she is not positive whether he is actually standing there talking to policemen or whether her thoughts have gotten syrupy.

  This is a story about a little boy named Steve who would grow up to be Horseman.

  This is a story about robots and lasers.

  This is a story about when I get married, Mommy. I’m going to have a wife. Her name will be Lucy. I’m going to have five boys and five girls. But they’ll grow in my belly, not hers, like seahorses do.

  She wants to hear his story. She will close her eyes and hear him better.

  She needs to keep her eyes closed, because the ribbons of light are too bright.

  Not ribbons. One light.

  A man is holding a flashlight and leaning over her.

  “Ma’am?” he says, and he is kneeling, and the light is gone. “You’re all right.” She feels something pressing hard on her leg. “You hold on a second. We’ve got help coming.”

  He is wearing a dark shirt, and there is the glare of something bright on his chest. She thinks he might be Mr. Simmons, a teacher she had in fifth grade, who read an essay she wrote and told her she was going to be somebody one day.

  “Lincoln,” she says.

  “Your boy?”

  The man pushes her hair back from her face, and he is so gentle about it.

  “Little dark-headed guy?” he asks her.

  Her eyes are closed. She is going to open them.

  “Lincoln,” she says.

  She thinks she says it.

  She thinks time passes. She feels herself lifted, raised up. There are voices, but they are not saying real words. There are more lights. There are shapes moving around her.

  She feels the touch of small fingers on her hand.

  She shifts slightly, and Lincoln’s hand fits into hers. She thinks that he says her name. She thinks that she can feel his breath, warm. She feels his skin against hers, and his fingertips are flickering across her palm, telling her every story she’s ever heard.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Laura Tisdel, my friend, who renewed my ridiculous dream that I might one day discover an editor who was brilliant and would also be fun at a slumber party. That is what this entire process has been like—one brilliant, long-distance slumber party. Both Frankie Gray and Anne Collins have helped to sculpt the book into a sleeker, better version of itself. I’m immensely grateful to Kim Witherspoon for telling me to make things more complicated and for, in general, managing an impressive combination of competence and charm. William Callahan helped me out with a smart and thoughtful read that made the book forever richer. Thank you, Jason Weekley, for your knowledge of guns and your helpful early fact-checking. Likewise, thank you to my brother Dabney for explaining what happens when you shoot various objects (and thank you for the goats).

  Thank you to my mother, Gina Kaye Phillips, for all the stories that come with more than four decades of teaching. Thanks to Hannah Wolfson for a helpful early conversation and to Donny Phillips for his cat escapades. I’d also like to acknowledge the references in this text to Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, and “That Hell-Bound Train” by Robert Bloch.

  Finally, thank you to Fred, best of husbands and best of readers.

  Gin Phillips is the award-winning author of The Well and the Mine and Come In and Cover Me. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family.

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