Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 113

by Neil Clarke

  After that, the Merais man really had no choice. The jacket made him take the rifle the dead general had left, and it made him go outside and fire it through the walls into the houses. Hano had been asleep, but the noise gave him enough time to throw himself to the ground and cover his head with his hands. A bullet bit his shoulder, but when the bullets ran out, he was still alive. The Ngo doctor bandaged him up.

  Hano was wheezing, but he tried to keep laughing, too. “The shots stopped, but I was afraid to go out until I heard that old widow shouting at him. I finally peeked out the door and saw her beating him, head and shoulders, with a pan. He was just standing there. The jacket still had him. Bang. Bang. Her face was so red! Kwesi had to pull her off so she didn’t kill him.”

  He tried to keep laughing.

  Kwesi was dead by the time he stopped the old widow, of course. One of the general’s bullets went through his eye. He just hadn’t been the kind of man to leave something undone that needed doing. Once he’d saved the Merais man’s life, he laid down and went back to being dead.

  “The widow said, at least Kwesi’s mother would always know where he was now—”

  Hano was still trying to laugh when we heard the cry.

  He clamped his mouth shut and so did I. We turned as silently as we could, searching for the flare of the burning child. I heard each swsh of my shoes.

  Suddenly, Hano smacked his hand against his leg. Shrieks of laughter ripped their way out of him.

  I followed his pointing finger toward a live child. She was crying, but not burning. A woman had come to comfort her.

  Hano’s laughter cut off abruptly. His voice went flat and quiet. “I hate this haunted village,” he said. “I hate this haunted country and I hate this haunted world.”

  Today was for selling, not gathering, but I went out anyway. I left before Hano woke up. Since the shooting, his eyes had been dull, yet he watched me. He wanted something from me and I thought I knew what.

  He hadn’t found me more cans yet, but I could manage scales. I wrapped my hands for whatever help it would give me, and went into the forest.

  The sky was the color of old bones. Orange clouds hovered, unmoving. The sweet-smelling trees were oddly quiet as if the animals were holding their breaths. Fleeing birds broke the silence as they cut into the air.

  Between the sweet-smelling trees, I saw the muntjac with the ox. The muntjac’s teeth were bloody. When it raised its head to glare at me, the skin of its face pulled backward like the grimace of a bat.

  The muntjac kept changing. The ox, lingering on, gave up its meat like the Hizhang cows.

  Truthfully, I remember a few torn things. I remember a picture of a tall woman putting her arms around one of the burning children. She must have died, but I don’t remember that part. My father died from an infection that started in his foot, but that’s all I know. It’s just words. I don’t remember why or how.

  The dragons didn’t take my memory. I let it go myself. I was staring at the ripped-up ceiling of Kwesi’s truck, and the road’s giant hand was shaking me apart. I thought why not let go, why not be easy for a while? I was probably going to die that day. If not, then probably the next.

  The sun was so, so bright, and I gave every memory to the leaf-green sky.

  I found Hano by the Ngo dump, with nothing in his hands, staring in the direction of the old general’s house. Kwesi had gotten up to help dig his own grave.

  I told him the other half of the answer to a question he’d asked long ago.

  It happens sometimes that when the dragons’ poison seeps inside you, you see what they’ve seen, feel what they’ve felt. So: It was late in the war, under a swallowing half-moon. The air was heavy without rain, and the moon was shining down and the blades of grass looked like bayonets. And the leaves of the trees hung down like swords. And the night was silver-black like drowning. And I came to the clearing.

  And I was tired. My mouth too much fire, my stomach empty, my scales split from firecracker whips. I did not know the Andé were the Andé, or the Zhie were the Zhie, or anything about the Rho. I knew the whips that drove me north and north and north, and I couldn’t sleep. So I came to sleep.

  And I laid my body among the bayonets.

  And the breath from my nostrils went deep into the earth and made pearl garlic grow.

  And my weight settled through my body and turned the soil into granite.

  And I did not dream.

  The Hizhang cows were still screaming even though it was already night because that was the first night the Hizhang cows screamed. I heard the vibrations of my sisters’ and brothers’ frustration as they were unleashed to kill, but never to feed enough to take away their hunger. And like them, I was hungry, and I stretched upward.

  And I saw my reflection standing in open air. I saw his hollow stomach, and whip-cracked scales. I saw his wild eyes.

  So, again: As that other dragon, I was driven by the gnawing in my stomach. I came to the clearing searching for meat, but instead I came upon my reflection. Pearl garlic frothed on the granite beneath her.

  I had been driven ten days without stopping. I was ready to kill everything in my path, I was ready to kill the Andé, but the Andé were never in front of me, only behind me, with their whips snapping at my tail.

  So, a third time: Both dragons, I circled inward, drawn in by my reflection’s scent loosed in the night. We came closer, and we came closer again. Necks twined. My teeth flashed and blood flowed down two throats. Talons scraped and grasped. Tails swept the remaining grass from the ground and the swords from the trees.

  Two dragons together, then two dragons each other, then twodragon rolling in itself. Hunger met with sating, sating met with hunger. For the first time since the Andé’s bite, I was full.

  And then Andé herders came with the sun in the durian sky, and they took after me with their firecracker whips. I became two again, and I and I left this place, leaving silver mist behind us.

  It was a long time before human-me was born, and lived a life, and forgot that life, and lived another life in Ponçan, but those things eventually happened, and left me by the dump with Hano.

  Hano has never been changed by a dragon, but he doesn’t need to be. He has a bullet wound in his shoulder. He knows what to expect.

  I told Hano, “It hurts to change the way I did.”

  He kept looking at me, expression no different than it was before.

  “They might do surgery to you. Make you a girl.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t care about that.”

  Life is not so bad in Ponçan. The roads going north are full of bandits. Where there are no bandits, there are dragon leavings worse than scales. Still, I said, “Tomorrow, then.”

  Hano wasn’t ready to laugh again, but the edges of his lips made an almost-smile.

  My name is Domei. Tomorrow, my best friend Hano and I leave for the capitol. We’re going to find the dragon-dance clearing before we go. If we’re lucky, Hano is going to change. If not, we’ll probably die.

  We probably should have died today.

  About the Authors

  An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.

  Rachel Swirsky is a short story writer living in Bakersfield, California. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She’s twice won the Nebula Award, in 2010 for her novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” and in 2014 for her short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She graduated from the Iowa Writer
s Workshop in 2008 and Clarion West in 2005. She’s honored to collaborate with her former student, An Owomoyela, for the second time.

  Blood Dauber

  Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore

  The animals hate you.

  You get used to that, working at a zoo. Over time, it becomes a thing you can respect.

  Bell trudged up the path, pushing the wheelbarrow before him, already sweating under his brown khaki uniform. He squinted in the bright sunlight, eyeing the exhibits as he ascended the hill: the goats and their pandering; the silly, horny monkeys; the slothful binturongs—all moving to the front of their enclosures as he approached.

  Most zoo animals eventually came to an understanding with those who brought the food. An uneasy truce.

  But Bell knew better than to trust it.

  He’d seen the scars.

  Mary had scars on her arms. Garland was missing the tip of one finger, and John, the assistant super, had a large divot in the calf of his right leg.

  “Zebra” was all he’d say.

  Bell was the newest zookeep. No scars yet. But a wariness.

  Walking up the hill that morning, Bell noticed Seana up ahead of him on the asphalt path. As he walked, he noticed she wore two different-colored socks—one red, the other white. He wondered if she were absent-minded, or just quirky. He hadn’t been at the zoo long, didn’t know her well.

  As he closed the distance, he saw that she was crying. And he realized why she wore one red sock. Her calf was gashed open, bleeding streams.

  He followed her into the staff room, and she explained that the juvenile baboon had attacked her.

  She was outraged. Betrayed.

  “Why did you go in there?” he asked.

  “I always go in there,” she said. “I was here when it was born. I raised it.”

  “Animals are unpredictable.”

  She shook her head. “It’s never done that before.”

  Never done that before.

  Bell thought about that on the way home. Surprises puzzled him.

  On one hand, it seemed there should never be any surprises. The world tended toward order, didn’t it? It circled the sun at the same speed all the time. Water boiled predictably, froze predictably. People weighed the same in Dallas as they did in Quebec. The speed of sound, in dry air, was 767 miles an hour.

  So why, Bell wondered, can’t he and his wife keep track of money, plan ahead, and stop living in a trailer? In an orderly world, this shouldn’t be impossible. In an orderly world, you shouldn’t have to choose between buying food and keeping your car insurance.

  Bell knew things were always more complicated than they looked. Water froze predictably, but strangely. It expanded. Crystals crashed and splintered. Sound moved faster underwater.

  “And you can’t keep from buying shit,” he thought aloud, driving home.

  He popped over the curb into the Lil’ Red Barn parking lot.

  They weren’t going to spend anything this week, Bell and Lin had agreed. They didn’t need to. Food in the fridge, gas in both cars. This week they wouldn’t spend.

  That morning, they’d run out of toilet paper.

  “It’s not an insurmountable problem,” he’d told Lin. “We have paper towels.”

  “You’re not,” said Lin, “supposed to put anything besides toilet paper in the toilet.”

  “But you can,” argued Bell, “if you need to.”

  Bell thought it was a spending problem. They knew how much money was coming in. If they controlled what went out, their money would be orderly, would increase. Lin disagreed.

  “It’s a matter of supply,” she had pointed out. “Your job needs to supply more money.”

  “So does yours.” Lin worked in the mall.

  She glared ice. Splinters and crystals.

  In Lin’s world, it was okay for her to criticize Bell. It was not okay for Bell to criticize Lin. Not if things were to be orderly. In every mating pair, Bell knew, one animal always bit harder than the other.

  Lin was the biter.

  And in their two-mammal world where daily life was defined by constant, grinding poverty, it seemed she bit constantly.

  It was important, they had once agreed, to do what they loved. To love their work.

  “I love my work,” Bell had told Lin a thousand times. Last month, in bed, he had told her how he loved his work, and they’d argued, and she’d scratched him with her fingernails. Drew blood. Made him want to hit her, and he almost did.

  But he didn’t. There were light years between wanting to hit a woman and actually doing it. Bell wasn’t that kind of man. Wasn’t that kind of animal. What kind of animal was he?

  He wondered if she knew. Wondered if she’d seen it in his eyes, the almost-hitting. The wanting to.

  He quit saying how much he loved his job.

  Most zookeepers, he knew, were women whose husbands made better money. They could afford the love.

  Lin knew this, too.

  “Shelly Capriatti’s husband sells guitars,” she had told him, just the night before. Shelly Capriatti was someone she worked with or worked out with, he couldn’t recall. “High end stuff, like for professionals. Like if Eric Clapton needed a new guitar. There’s no reason you couldn’t do something like that. He makes a ton of money.”

  And he was on the edge, as he often was, of admitting to himself that he wished he hadn’t gotten married, when she stretched herself across his lap in front of their eleven-year-old TV and was nice for a while. Long enough for him to sweep some hard truth under the rug. Again. It was easier that way.

  He focused on that—the niceness—while he paid the cashier at the Lil’ Red Barn.

  She could be nice. Things in general, sometimes, were nice.

  Sometimes she was predictable, which was easier, but you had to be ready for both. Driving into the trailer park, he thought about that.

  The baboon had never attacked anyone. Then, today, it did.

  There’s a first time for everything.

  “You’re cute the way a dog is cute,” Lin had told him, in front of the TV.

  You run out of toilet paper.

  Things fall apart.

  Not having money was a theme in Bell’s life. Even the zoo was a poor zoo, poorly funded.

  Sometimes people complained. Once, a woman had come in, and when she’d seen the conditions in which the lions were housed, she’d been angry. People loved the lions.

  “It’s a cage,” she said.

  Bell had agreed with her.

  “Zoos are supposed to be . . . natural,” she continued. “They’re supposed to be habitats, and the animals aren’t even supposed to realize they’re confined.”

  Bell understood. He sympathized. He’d been to zoos like that, too, in towns that weren’t dying.

  “Do you think they don’t know?” he asked.

  She only stared at him.

  “Do you think, in these other zoos, that the animals don’t know they’re locked in?”

  “A disgrace,” she said, walking away.

  Low funding required management to get creative when provisioning the animals. In addition to supplies bought on the open market, there were arrangements with local grocery stores, and butchers, and meat processors. A truck was taken around each day to be filled with heaps of food—loaves of bread that had passed their freshness dates, meat that had begun to turn, gallons of milk that had expired. Occasionally there was carrion brought in—deer which had been struck on the highway and then picked up by the county. All of it fed into the bottomless maw of the zoo.

  The trucks would drive around back and unload their cargo into the kitchen.

  It was called the kitchen, but it was not a kitchen. It was a room with several huge stainless steel tables on which food was piled and sorted and divided.

  Bell was on his way to the castle when a voice on his walky-talky stopped him. “Bell, there’s something you need to see.”

  Lucy, one of the kitchen workers, out of breat
h.

  He got there fast. Came in through the back door.

  “It’s a bug,” said Lucy, hands at her collar.

  “What kind?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “The ugly kind.” She pointed at a bowl turned upside-down on the counter.

  Bell lifted the bowl. Put it down again.

  He stood perfectly still.

  He lifted the bowl and stole another quick glance.

  “Hmm,” he said and lowered the bowl.

  The kitchen workers stared. “What is it?”

  “I’m working on it,” he said. He looked into the distance. “I think it’s a grub of some sort.”

  “I didn’t think grubs got that big,” Lucy said.

  “No,” Bell said. “Neither did I.”

  Bell looked again. The grub was large, fleshy and blood red. Five inches long.

  “Where did it come from?” he asked.

  She shrugged again. “The table.”

  Bell looked at the table. There were watermelons, and apples, and bread, and the partially disarticulated hock of a deer. Several bunches of blackened bananas made a mountain in the center, along with a smaller mound of more exotic fruit shipped in from Lord-knew-where.

  “It could have come in with anything,” she said. “I found it crawling along the edge of the table there.” She shuddered. “It was moving pretty fast.”

  Bell retrieved a glass jar from the cabinet, opened the lid, then dragged the bowl across the edge of the table so the strange grub dropped into the jar. He stepped outside and plucked some grass, put the grass inside, and closed the lid. Poked holes.

  He took the jar across the zoo to the castle and placed it on a shelf in the back room.

  “The castle” was the name used for the entomology building. Bell could only imagine what the structure’s original use had been, with its block construction and odd turrets; but whatever that long ago intent, it now housed all manner of creepy crawlers—hissing cockroaches, and ant farms, and snakes, and lizards and frogs. Anything that required darkness or careful temperature control.

  The building was a box within a box. There was an open, central area ringed on three sides by walls and exhibits—and just behind these walls was a space called the back room, closed to the public, which was actually a single narrow hall that conformed to the outside perimeter of the building, a gap space where you could access the back side of the cages. At the far end of this hall, in a dead-end spot furthest from the entry door was a table and chairs, a TV, a desk, and several terrariums. These extra terrariums were where the sick were boarded, those unfit for public examination.