Sweetlings

by Lucy Taylor

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  The night before my mother walked into the New Sea carrying my six-week-old brother, I heard her and Papi arguing. Even with the wind screaming past our tiny squatter’s house on the cliff, the rage in her voice slashed through the thin wall.

  “It’s not right! I’d rather smother the boy in his sleep than do this!”

  “But you must,” Papi said. His voice was firm and deliberate, the way he sounded telling me to take a dose of foxglove to ward off Blister Rot or refusing Mama’s entreaties to leave this lonely, wind-battered place and take our chances inland. Kind, but unyielding. “The child is suffering. See how he struggles to breathe. I’d carry him into the water myself, but my legs are too weak … and I won’t ask Mir to do it.”

  “Then don’t ask it of me!”

  “It’s not in our hands, don’t you see? We’ve got to accept what this new world is becoming, not torment ourselves with what we’d like it to be.”

  His words reminded me of Jersey, who even now—two years later—has a kind of mad optimism that sees the Great Inundation and the ensuing havoc and death as some kind of exciting adventure, a new start for humanity instead of a long bitter trudge to extinction.

  Mama’s sobbing played counterpoint to the howl of the wind.

  “We were fools to have another baby! Not in these times. We shouldn’t have had Mir either. Look at her! Maybe it’s her I ought to take into the sea!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with our daughter,” Papi said. “She’s thirteen. Shy about her body and starting to think about sex. A difficult age at the best of times.”

  “I wish she was dead! I wish we were all dead!”

  In her despair, she threw something, a dish or a cup that shattered twice, the first time against the wall, the second time, inside my heart. I’d heard enough. I scrambled out the window next to my bed and hurled myself down the path that hair-pinned along the cliff side. The cliff was unstable, the high tides gouging out chunks of earth and rock whose thunderous collapse sometimes made the house sway, but I ran recklessly, heedless. If I fell, I’d become just one more corpse among thousands, people who’d lived and died in places Papi’s Grandma Ortega used to talk about when I was small. She still remembered the Old Coast towns like Campbells Landing and Pungo, even as far inland as Richmond, Virginia, where the Atlantic Ocean, the James River, and the Chesapeake Bay combined to sweep out cities and reconfigure the east coast.

  As I ran, I could see moonlight on the chain of debris islands offshore—soiled tiaras formed out of junk—girders and bot parts and smashed weather drones, agri-panels tortured into sinister shapes, a smashed airbus and the skeleton of a horse. A human skull with a tire iron through its teeth grimaced from the top of a flagpole.

  The path narrowed. I crept along until my fingers found a wind-chiseled gap in the sandstone. From the hollow within came warmth and the reek of charring sea vermin.

  Inside, Jersey crouched by the fire, turning the meat on a coat hanger skewer, his hand gloved with rags. He was fifteen then, small for his age, but wiry and strong, the ferocity of his will to survive making up for what he lacked in stature. He wore khaki shorts two sizes too big and a blue bandanna that held back his long, dark auburn hair.

  He looked up. “Thought you weren’t coming.”

  I slumped beside him. “It’s the baby! I think Mama’s going to drown him.”

  His eyes got big as twin moons. They’re deep blue eyes, which is so weird-looking. When I first saw him, I felt afraid. Like he might carry some strange disease. Papi says in years past, such eyes were common, but it’s hard to believe. “Jesus, Mir, why would she do that? We need all the babies we can get! Is something wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know. Mama kept him in the room with her. She never let me see him.”

  Which was a lie, of course. I’d seen my brother plenty of times: like all baby animals, he was pink and wriggly and (I guess) cute, but fell somewhat short of being fully human. If Jersey knew I was lying, though, he didn’t let on. After all, he needed to stay on my good side. At that time, I was one of only three girls near his age in the settlement. One of them, Galveston Fenwick, was already pregnant and living with her betrothed. The other, sixteen-year-old Sabra Pacheco, had Blister Rot in her crotch and would never be able to have babies. Which meant that, unless he left the settlement and struck out on his own, I was Jersey’s only realistic prospect for sex.

  “Eat something, Mir.” He twisted a lump of meat off the skewer. Crisped, insectile legs and blackened, indented eyeballs were part of the presentation. I felt my gorge rise.

  “I’m ok. Supply truck’s due any day.”

  “Sure it is. Fuckin’ driver’s probably a hundred miles from here stuffing his face with our food.”

  He had a point. In theory, the supply truck made the run down the New Coast from Charlottesville every few weeks, bringing food and medical supplies to the pockets of people still toughing it out by the sea, but its arrival was already sporadic, the portent of more hardships to come. Maybe the people in the western settlements had forgotten us. Maybe they were starving, too, and had no food to send. Maybe they were all dead.

  To please Jersey, I nibbled a few bites of the mystery crustacean. The temperature dropped, and a harsh chemical rain began spilling in from the east, smelling faintly of ozone and motor oil. We spent the night clinging to each other, as if huddled inside a giant clam shell. Once I woke up so hungry that I brought Jersey’s grubby fingers up to my mouth and licked off the taste of burnt sea life.

  At daybreak, Jersey took his gaff hook and net and went to fish in the tidal pools. I returned home, where Papi told me Mama had walked into the sea with the baby. Her body washed up days later, teeth marks on her belly and a specimen of formerly extinct sea life snagged in her hair.

  I never saw my brother again.

  *

  The trilobites are the first miracle, Papi says, and I suppose he should know. Before I was born, he taught high school science and studied oceanography in his spare time. He took his students on field trips to look for fossils in what used to be the Allegheny Mountains.

  According to Papi, the trilobites’ return from extinction—heralded by that first one I found in my dead mother’s hair—signaled that the earth is reinventing itself, lurching toward a new equilibrium. The second miracle is that these “new, improved” trilobites have gills modified to leach oxygen out of the air, so they can thrive on both land and in the water.

  “Look, Mir! See how it kills its prey! How it stabs with its leg spines and feeds chunks of the worm into its mouth!” Papi sits in a wheelchair Jersey and I took from a dead guy whose house we were looting. Reverently, he gazes at the live-action natu
re show being played out on his forearm: Permian-era arthropod versus post–Great Inundation earthworm. The trilobite’s leg spines make short work of the meal, and remind me just how dangerous these creatures can be: curled up in a ball for protection, they look harmless enough, but snatch an enrolled tril too fast or too roughly and the spines thrust out like jointed razors. This tril is the color of sea grass and mud, its leg spines half the length of its body. Five inches of prehistoric arthropod, it belongs to a species Papi says died off some two hundred and fifty million years ago.

  Until recently, that is, when the New Sea began belching them up like a horde of sea locusts.

  “Fucking amazing, aye?” he exclaims. “Look how the cephalon bulges—brood pouches, I’d say. Where did you find it?”

  “Down the Old Road past the duck farm, in the ditch where Hetti Spooner drowned.”

  “Two miles then.”

  “Give or take.”

  He cocks his head toward the window, following some stray wisp of thought. Honeyed light slants onto two large aquariums on the table beside him. In one, trilobites sun on a small island of pebbles and mud or crawl underwater along the edge of the glass. The second aquarium churns with the slow, restless thrashing of its lone occupant, a foot-long, eel-shaped fish with four lobed fins and bugged-out, manic eyes. This one’s just a baby, but still so dangerous it makes the trilobites look like lap cats by comparison.

  “Trilobites on land—think of the ramifications!” Papi declares as the last of the worm disappears into the trilobite’s barbed mouth. “Evolution is moving to erase its mistakes, to create a new hierarchy of life that may or may not include humans. Who knows what our odds are at this point? But trilobites back from extinction—and amphibious, no less—that’s a miracle I’m thankful I lived to see!”

  He speaks with terrifying conviction, a mad prophet gleefully reading into catastrophe a harbinger of still worse to come.

  I nod toward the second aquarium, where the metallic blue, eel-like fish snakes back and forth, squeaks against the glass and loops back, loops again. “What about Old Four Legs? Is he a miracle, too?”

  Papi frowns at my use of the nickname. Some scientist bestowed it on this oily, foul-flavored fish over a century ago, but Papi’s a stickler for using proper, scientific terms.

  “The coelacanth, you mean. They were never extinct. Scientists in the early twentieth century thought they were, but then they turned up off the coast of South Africa and later, in a fish market in Indonesia. Evolution-wise, a fascinating creature! Ancestors of tetrapods, four-leggeds who live on land. More adaptable than humans, I’d wager. Not a miracle perhaps, but who knows—they may outlive us all.”

  “So you think humans are just some kind of cosmic fuck-up?”

  I want reassurance. I want him to hug me against his chest and tell me not to be silly, no way will evolution conspire to do in the human race, but instead a weird elation illuminates his swarthy face and his eyes glow with the radiance of stars. When he speaks, the words are measured and hushed, like a prayer. “What I think, Mir, is that the Great Inundation was just the beginning. Humanity may be a failed experiment. Now nature’s wiping the slate clean. A new environment, new species evolving at a breakneck pace!” He flexes his huge hands as if trying to physically contain the vastness of the idea and looks over at the tril perched on his shoulder like an exotic pet roach.

  “The trilobites’ adaptation to land should have taken millions of years. How did it occur in just a few generations? I found a theory about that, you know—punctuated equilibrium—the idea that after environmental upheaval, surviving species branch out into new ones over a very short period of time. They might even leave the water for land or vice versa.”

  I consider this. “So, this punctuation thing, is that why the baby looked like he did?”

  “The baby—? There was nothing wrong with the baby.” He tilts his head, confused and suddenly rattled. I’ve seen this change in him before, a shift in mood like a land in the grip of unpredictable seasons, thoughts massing like storm clouds before evaporating into the pale, scoured sky of his mind. In such moments, he is a stranger to me and I to him. Like those nights when I find him at the window, staring out at the New Sea as if spellbound. When I say his name and he turns to me, there’s no recognition. It’s as though I’m nothing he’s ever seen before, but something fabulous and faintly unclean, a bizarre species of spider fish or toad that just hopped and wriggled its way into creation.

  Perhaps in search of more food, the tril has begun climbing into Papi’s thick, matted hair. He shakes his head, shudders. “Take this thing, will you? Put it back in the tank.”

  I pluck the tril loose using kitchen tongs and start to drop it into the tank with its kin. Papi stops me. “Not that one, Mir. Feed it to the coelacanth, please.”

  I’m surprised, because usually we feed Old Four Legs fish scraps, but I do as he says. The tril doesn’t even have time to curl into a protective ball before the coelacanth torpedoes in, sheers off the spines with one slashing bite and gobbles upward through the exoskeleton. Bits of gill filaments and sections of thorax swirl in the water.

  I’m repulsed by the carnage, but weirdly hypnotized too, imagining the danger posed by such fish when they’re fully grown, six-foot-long monsters that roam coastal waters and hang out on the mudflats waiting for prey. You see someone missing a foot or a hand, most likely they lost a fight with a coelacanth.

  “Wish the smelly fuckers were extinct,” I mutter.

  Papi works his tongue around in his mouth and spits something into the tank. A yellowed incisor floats to the bottom leaking a thin trail of blood.

  I pretend not to see and don’t tell him some of mine are loose, too.

  Losing teeth is apparently part of the great evolutionary plan.

  *

  The next day ushers in the worst of summer’s heat and humidity, when breathing feels like gagging on a wet sponge, and there’s a metallic tang to the drizzle. In the settlement, rumors circulate that the supply truck has been spotted to the north and people gather by what used to be the open-air market, the most optimistic of them bearing sacks and wheelbarrows with which to tote off their plunder. I join the Pugmire kids and Crazy Paki Begaye, who clutches an Kindle Fire that hasn’t worked since Papi was a boy, but that he holds on to like the hand of his mother. For hours, we loiter in the energy-sapping heat. The supply truck doesn’t show. We are all idiots.

  I’m about to give up when I see Jersey jogging up the main road and go to meet him. He’s sweating and red-faced and gives me a longer than usual hug. I know immediately something is wrong.

  “You should have been at school today, Mir. You won’t believe it! Mr. Watanabi tried to shoot himself!”

  “Watanabi! You’re kidding!” Not much shocks me these days, but this does—the image of the staid and scholarly Mr. Watanabi going into freak-out mode is both hilarious and deeply disturbing. Watanabi is like Papi used to be, a rock of calm in the tempest, predictability amid chaos. That even he is losing it now scares me more than I want to admit.

  “What happened?”

  He takes my hand and leads me away from the small knots of people, up the Old Road where the air is so laden with oil-tainted mist I see only his silhouette ghosting beside me.

  “Watanabi was teaching about the Hush Phase—after the First Inundation when everybody thought the waters had calmed and they could rebuild. He was a teenager then. He said people turned to superstition and magic, trying to placate nature to keep the water from rising again. They started to worship old sea gods like Triton and Mizuchi. They’d leave legs of beef and sheep heads on the shore for an offering.”

  “Papi told me about that. Waste of good meat. Crazy, huh?”

  “They believed in demons too, half-human monsters that would drag people into the water and drown them. Some wouldn’t even eat fish. They were too afraid of angering the sea gods.”

  “But that was so long ago. Why would Watanabi wa
nt to kill himself over ancient history?”

  Jersey tightens his grip on my hand. “Because he thinks the monsters have come back, that’s why. Or maybe they never went away. He says there’s something huge that crawls out of the water at night and hides in the thicket behind his vegetable garden. He hears it slithering around, but he’s afraid to go outside. All he’s seen are its tracks entering the water. He thinks it’s a demon waiting for a chance to kill him and eat him and that whatever it is, it will come for us, too!”

  “Holy shit, what did you do?”

  “Well, at first everybody’s dead quiet, stunned, but then a few kids start to giggle. Pretty soon everybody’s laughing. I mean, I laughed, too, I couldn’t help it. That’s when he pulls out the gun. I think, oh fuck he’s going to shoot us, but he puts it in his mouth! I’ve never even seen a real gun, but me and Pete Spooner, we grabbed him and took it away. A couple other kids walked him home. He was still sobbing and struggling.” He shrugs. “Shit, I guess that’s the end of school.”

  I can’t shake the image he’s left me with. “I can’t believe Watanabi had a gun!”

  “Not anymore.” He digs in his pocket and pulls out a matte black Glock about the size of my hand. “You think it’s loaded?”

  “Let’s see.”

  I take the gun, click open the cartridge, and show him its innards—six amber bullets. Hollow points.

  “How’d you know how to do that?”

  I try not to smirk. “Papi taught me when I was five.”

  We trudge in silence through the foul-tasting mist, the reality of the gun hanging between us like a dangerous secret, until Jersey stops and clears his throat like he’s got something important to say. Blurts out, “There’s something I need to show you. I wasn’t going to because I didn’t want to scare you, but I need to know what you think it might be.”

  We take a last longing look at the road the supply truck will take if it ever arrives, then head northeast, beyond the dirt roads to the soggy, bramble-strewn fields where Jersey and I sometimes hunt frogs and long-legged brown limpkins. I’m used to it here, but today the fog and the silence unnerve me. Freddy Elkins was set upon by Road People here, and a supply truck was hijacked and the driver stabbed and dismembered a couple years back.