i’ve never stopped talking to you.
I drop the syringe, staring.
what did I tell you? do you remember?
His lips aren’t moving.
everything will change, and—
“No one will say—”
Dad raises a hand to his lips. He points one finger up, just below his right eye. Flecks of silver swim in the brown, like neon in the night, like open doors.
a single word
I don’t even have to concentrate. All I have to do is be still.
“It won’t last. Before the pharmacy shut down, I bought as much as I could. But it’s not an endless supply, it was never meant to be. Eventually you’ll have to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Command them.”
Whispers, behind me. Inside me. Familiar and soothing, like when I hold Mom’s pillow to my face and breath deep, inhale the faint fading scent of her skin. I pull the oxiclamp from my nose. Smoke from burning trash lingers in the air. Somewhere beyond hundreds of miles of crumbling city blocks, the sun rises. I lean over the rail, stare at the dark thread of the street. I follow the line to the horizon, and look up.
One building ripples with movement, then another, and another. It spreads, as if the canyon is a wound, bleeding drops of water that take on the colors of concrete and sky. The droplets spread, pouring themselves toward me, growing larger with every second. Not water, but iron, bone and blood, camouflaged to move like rain in the wind. But this place is too narrow for the stealth of so many, and the quiet of morning reveals their sounds. They push the air before them, and it carries the rustling of weaponry, the soft click of claws and guns, the scent of singed fur and leathered skin. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. They keep coming. Hundreds of thousands. Four hundred thousand. Four hundred thousand, and one.
He appears in midair as his stealth armor deactivates. I watch the creature—Sidabras, that’s what I’d named him—soar in a graceful arc, claws striking into steel-plated walls. Sidabras holds, pauses, then leaps again. Once there were birds, and they flew, and never had to walk. Is this was it was like, before the war? To watch creatures fly above us, and not cower from burning fuel and fuselage?
Several low explosions echo back and forth down the canyon, rattling balconies. “Bombs,” I say, panic creeping over the wonder. “This is really happening. They’re destroying the base.” Dad steps up behind me, gripping my shoulder.
“This had to happen.”
“There’ll be nothing left but chaos.”
chaos is change.
Engines concuss the neighborhood—the battle cruisers are springing to life. And now the stealth armor of all the soldiers fades, and everything around me turns black. I gasp and cling to Dad. All of these people came out of me. Soldiers hang all around us, cling to balconies and ledges beside us, above, and below. Male and female and other, dark-skinned and muscular, four hundred thousand in all. Silent, waiting for me to command them. I can see their wide eyes—dark brown pupils floating in silver seas. They have something of me in them, after all. How much of them do I have in me?
The balcony edge blurs, flickers, and he is there. Sidabras stands, tongue lolling from the edges of his fangs in a soft pant. Blood dots his strafed armor, oozes in a sticky line from the fur of his upper arm. I didn’t realize how large he is, how much space he takes. There’s no glass between us now.
Dad pushes me forward, gently. I smell singed flesh, sweat, steel. Sidabras lowers his head, and I stare in his mercury eyes. His breath smells of the long-gone parks, of damp black earth beneath trees. I reach up, touch the matted fur of his muzzle. He doesn’t move away.
you are loyal.
Command them.
His words sound clear and crisp this time. I notice that the communications device has been ripped from his throat and chest, leaving raw wounds. I turn to
Dad, but he steps back, as if handing everything over to me.
Command them.
I look around us. In the clear morning air, my children stare at me, open and expectant. I catch the eye of one, a young man almost as large as Sidabras. He stands on the balcony opposite us, a large rifle in his hands. He has hands. He has a face. He smiles. My heart feels like it’s on fire again.
“My son. He’s my son.”
“He’s your soldier,” says Dad. “They all are. And so am I. Tell us what to do.”
All around me, the four hundred thousand watch as the world opens up before me. I can leave. I can stay. I can destroy the city, maybe the world. I can disappear into the great mystery of space. I can stand here and do nothing, until the buildings crumble down. I feel Sidabras’ hot breath on my face, feel the distant vibration of the cruisers. Feel my children, feel Sidabras and Dad, waiting.
“Are you with me?” I ask my father. He smiles.
“I’ve always been with you, sweetie.”
I decide.
I turn to Sidabras, but he’s already raising his hand, signaling to the rest. He knows my thoughts as I think them. Movement, all around. Dad gathers his pack and the remaining syringes, and I wrap my arms around the father of twenty-four divisions, lash myself to his armor, hold tight.
“Mom should have waited,” I whisper into his fur. I’ll never see this apartment again, never sleep on the little couch, never huddle in the stairwell, trapped in sleepless fear. A large hand steals over mine, and some delicate emotion seeps from Sidabras into me, comforting and warm. There will be other trees, it seems to say, other families. New possibilities. New loyalties and love.
Sidabras jumps.
And now the moment of sorrow is gone, and so is everything old and tired. Only the empty space before us exists, space and the rising sun. Behind me, I hear Dad laughing, like he used to long ago. I’d look back, but I don’t need to, ever again. I see how we move in the world. We unfurl like the wings of some long-dead god, resurrected and in flight, to the end of my street, and up, and beyond. We will all of us wear the stars—father, daughter, four hundred thousand, and one.
Brimstone Orange
The tree was a gift to her mother on the day of Cyan’s birth, but it was barren. In her fourteen years, Cyan had never seen the stark, mean limbs bear anything, save for a creeping fungus. She didn’t even know what kind of tree it was.
“I don’t remember,” said her mother, uneasily. “It’s tropical, it wouldn’t grow in this part of the country anyway. It was a mistake.”
There were other trees in the yard—apple and pear, each laden with fruit by high summer. But her mother wouldn’t speak of them, just like she wouldn’t speak of the two locked rooms in the house. She never let Cyan enter the rooms, or touch or eat the fruit. It rotted on the ground; and the flies grew fat.
Cyan seethed. And she labored. She cast stones, mixed potions, held afternoon vigils with her girlfriends. They serpentined round the tree, long toes ripping grass as they swayed and chanted dreamy nonsense. She ran her tongue against the trunk, wove strands of her hair in the branches. But the gnarled wood remained lifeless.
Summer came and went; so did autumn. Her mother brought home oranges and sugarcane. Cyan spent evenings at the window, sucking sweetness till her lips cracked. In soft moonlight, the trees were equally beautiful, from tips to base. As her fingers traveled down the smooth length of cane, Cyan smiled….
Midnight found her kneeling in grass, thick clumps of dirt all around. One by one she peeled and plucked segments of orange from its skin, then passed them between her legs. In the secret crevices of the tree, she gently tucked away the red-stained pulp. After, Cyan cradled the slender trunk, her fingers buried in its roots.
“Bear something for me,” she pleaded in her sleep. “Bear me.”
Hot lips and a smoking tongue woke her as slivers of orange pressed into her mouth. Cyan stirred—the creature moved with her, sliding rough arms across her naked flesh. She shivered, swallowed the fruit. They kissed again, and she fed from him. After a while, she didn’t know
where she left off and he began, only that he was inside her and she in him, that even in the rings of his cold splintered flesh, her belly felt ripe as the sun.
The sloe-eyed neighborhood girls gathered, and whispered. After her daughter disappeared, the woman took to crawling round the yard, scratching and weeping at the roots of her trees. “Don’t eat the fruit!” she howled. The girls asked why, but the woman couldn’t give them any reasons. They asked about Cyan— “What’s Cyan?” she said. The girls’ firm vows to guard the fruit consoled her, even as strange men bound and whisked the woman away.
But after a while the girls forgot, and flocked to the trees like birds. The cherries and pears were all right, but the salty-sweet oranges won their hearts. They stained their lips bright crimson.
And inside, how they burned.
Take Your Daughters to Work
Sadie smooths down her long brown hair, then fastens a choker around her neck. She stares at herself in the mirror. Today her father is taking her to work, and she must be perfect. There will be other girls there, other daughters brought to work by their fathers. But her father runs the company, and so she sets the example. All who look on her must see perfection—otherwise, her father will be shamed.
From the darkened master bedroom, weeping rises. Sadie adjusts the heavy gold at her throat—her mother gave it to her this morning. It’s been in the family at least a thousand years. She leans close to the mirror, and smiles.
“Don’t worry,” she tells her quicksilver self. “You’ll do just fine.”
The train station swells with the chatter of a thousand excited girls. Sadie walks slowly, her head held high. Her father’s fingers trace patterns in the air as they climb the metal steps to his private car, fathers and first-born daughters crowding into the rest. Beneath her feet, engines throb. A lurch and a thrust: now the city parts as the train flows inside.
Sadie perches on the stiff horsehair seat, watching rooftops sail past the elevated tracks. Young men in brown livery pour tea into porcelain cups, and Sadie remembers to hold her little finger out, like a lady. The tea is the color of the sky—sulphur tinged with whorls of cloudy grey. It is the color of the webbing between the young men’s fingers, the color of milky pupils in their lidless eyes.
“Will we see the ocean behind the factories? You promised.”
Sadie’s father smiles.
“I did indeed. You’ll see all the waters of the world.”
Sadie sips her tea, touches her throat with nervous hands. Outside, the horizon rushes toward them, a forest of massive smokestacks pumping out fire and haze under a burnt orange sun. The liveried men bow and sway, strange words bursting in wet pops from their lips. Fire makes them nervous. Sadie understands. She’s nervous, too.
Her father leads her to the observation car as they pass the first edges of the factory. Sadie stares in wonder at blackened brick rising all around her, at steel pipes tangled around cauldrons larger than her house. Red sparks float in the air like weightless rubies. The factory is the only ocean she’s ever seen, and it crashes against the city like a storm. Every year, another row of crumbling homes is eaten away. This is the way of the world, His way, her father has explained. If they cannot raise the old city with the old ways, they will bring it up from the deep, piece by piece, and the factory will rebuild it. Sadie cranes her neck, staring at thick columns blotting out the sky—she can see their fixed surfaces, but feels the walls bleeding through other dimensions, dragging a bit of her soul with them. Nauseated, she swallows hard.
“Remember what I told you, Sadie?” Her father touches her lightly, and she turns away.
“Never look directly at the edges,” she recites, and he gives her shoulder a quick squeeze.
“That’s my girl.” He fingers the choker, moving the interlocking hydras into place. Two small rings hang down from either side, like gaping mouths. His fingers hook them, gently. “You’re the reason I work so hard. You’re our future. I know you’ll make me proud.”
Alien emotion swims up from Sadie’s heart, and catches in her throat. The skin beneath the metal swells and chafes.
“I know,” she replies. “I know.”
Deep within the heart of the factory, Sadie shakes the scaled hands of many important men. Secretaries slither before her, leaving trails of damp that evaporate quickly in the factory heat. They give her gifts of seashells, and lovely historicals of the factory’s beginnings, bound in gilt-edged skin. Sadie eats lunch on a courtyard crowned by pyramids of slag, at a coral table set just for the daughters. Metal fines cling to their skin, settle in their food. Sometimes, Sadie lays down her fork and gasps for a bit of air. Just nerves, she tells herself, and wills herself to breathe.
Afternoon fades, as small trams whisk them down mile-long shafts to a room of pale rib and abalone, where dry air gives way to plump humidity, ocean-sweet. Sadie licks her lips, and tugs at the heavy gold around her neck. Her father holds her hand as they cross the floor, and when they reach the double doors at the far wall, it’s as if she’s traveled to the end of Time. Behind them, vice-presidents and company managers hover, their daughters clinging anxiously to their coats.
“Open the door, Sadie.”
Sadie wipes the sweat from her hands, and pushes. Brisk wind and the roar of surf rush in as Sadie leads them onto the balcony. Below, black sands speckled with skulls descend in jagged dunes down to the endless sea. It is everything her father promised, and more.
“Can we go down?” Her lungs expand, and baleen inside her corset snaps.
“Lead the way.” He points to wide steps plunging into the coarse sands. Sadie skips down the steps and into the dunes, all the girls following behind like a veil of trailing flowers. Overhead, pipes larger than the train thrust from the factory walls, plunging straight into iron-grey waves. As she reaches the beach’s edge, factory horns sound one by one, great spine-shuddering cries that send the waters rushing back. Sadie stops and turns. All along the curving coast, green light explodes from pockets of the factory—signal fires lighting the way.
The men spread out across the beach, directing their daughters to the edge of the tide line. Before them, dark shapes rise from receding waves—cobblestone roads slick with foam, low houses clustered like rotting mushrooms, and beyond…. The sandy ridge breaks off and free-falls into the rift. Sadie spies chimney stacks peeking up from the depths, bioluminescent smoke coiling in the air, freed of the weight of water. Soft movements appear, as flippers and webbed feet emerge from gaping doors. More employees of her father, ready to greet them all. Sadie spies the liveried young man from the train car, and her heart skips a beat.
Some of the girls cry as their fathers pull chains up from the sands, attaching them at the loops in their golden hydra chokers. The chains stretch out along the ancient roads and over the edges of the rift, ending in the city below. Sadie trembles slightly as her father stretches out his hand, links of black metal dripping off his palm. Beneath her choker, skin stretches wide, half-developed gills sucking at the moisture in the air as they vaguely remember what to do.
“I’ll always love you. Remember that, in the last moments.” Her father looks down at her, the tentacles of his beard coiling into a hundred tender smiles.
“Of course.” Sadie covers his hand with her own. In the dying light, the silver of her bones shine through the flesh, luminous and pure. “When my bones are added to the city, you’ll see me. We’ll never be apart. It is my honor to join the work.”
“You are my greatest gift, my greatest sacrifice.” As he kisses her forehead, his tears fall onto her skin. Sadie feels the chain slide through the hydra’s mouths as he carefully hooks it in place. Somewhere, beneath the rift, strong tentacles hold the other end. Sadie prays to the Mother that whoever accepts her, he is vast and terrible. After all, her father runs the factory, and she is her father’s daughter. She sets the example till the day her chained bones, heavy with spawn, are pulled back from her bridal grave.
“Our work
renews our world,” her father says. “Our daughters renew our lives. In His name we bring them together. In His name, we take our daughters to work.”
Sadie steps onto the slick cobblestones, and the employees of New Y’ha-nthlei Steelworks follow, each of them walking their daughters into the rising waves.
Omphalos
No distractions, no tourists. Where there’s nothing at all. You know the place. You’ve been there, before. It’s where you always go.” He places his calloused finger at the center of your forehead, and you almost piss yourself in fear: does he know?
“Where we can—you know.”
Your mother takes Jamie aside, her fingers sliding around his slender waist as she spins her own version of the same tale. Father winks and parts his lips, coffee and cigarette breath drifting across your face as he whispers in your ear.
“Be alone.”
Vacation has begun.
Salt ocean air and the cries of gulls recede as Father guides the camper through Port Angeles. You wish you could stay, walk through the postcard-pretty gingerbread-housed streets with Jaime, shop for expensive knick-knacks you don’t need, daydream of a life you’ll never have. Father drives on. Office buildings and shopping districts give slow way to industrial parks and oversized construction sheds surrounded by rusting bulldozers and dump trucks. None of it looks permanent, not even the highway. 101 lengthens like overworked taffy into a worn, three-lane patchwork of blacktop and tar. Campers and flat-beds, station wagons and Airstreams all whoosh across its surface, with you and against you. Port into town, town into suburbs, suburbs into the beyond. The sun has returned in vengeance, and all the grey clouds have whipped away over the waters, following the ferry you were never meant to take.
“Once we’re off the highway, we can follow the logging roads,” Father shouts over the roaring wind as he steers the camper down the Olympic Highway. He sounds excited, almost giddy. “They’ll take us deep into the Park, past the usual campgrounds and tourist spots, past the Ranger Stations, right into the heart of the forest. And then, once the logging roads have ended—well, look at the map. Just see how far we can go.”
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors Page 16
