After a moment, Alice said with a glance, “I want to write down about the oystercatchers.”
“Yes. You should do that.”
The girl’s look shifted toward the sky in the west, the thick black flaw above the tops of the trees. “Did you work out what killed them? The oystercatchers?”
She hesitated. “No. But I hope someone will discover it eventually. You should write down everything you saw around the time of the storm, and afterward. But only what you know or have seen. These things might be important, later, to understanding what occurred.”
The woman who had answered the door was still watching from the porch of the Whalebone Inn. Now she called out, “Alice, you ought to be washing up for supper before long.” The wind lifted and snapped the front of her apron like a flag.
Alice answered her, “I will,” but without moving to do it.
Then, after a silence, Alice said, “I have seen birds going into that hole in the sky. Have you? There’s saw-whets and barred owls that live on Long Island and when I was camped over there the other night I saw five of them go up.”
She had written that morning: Fourteen willets—usually solitary, have never seen so many fly together—up and gone. She had seen children on the beach write notes and tie them into the tails of kites, and when they let go the tethering string the kites lifted into the blackness and disappeared. She did not say any of this to Alice.
She said, “You should write down what you saw, the owls disappearing, but Alice, no one knows what it is, so you shouldn’t call it a hole in the sky.” Then she said, “Did you row over to the island? The bay has been very rough.” From the dock at Nahcotta it was at least a mile across Willapa Bay to Long Island. When she was no older than Alice, she had used to row a canoe on Clear Lake even in the fall when the hard easterly winds would blow foam off the choppy waves; but that was before Tom drowned.
The girl shrugged. “I went at low tide, and it was shoalwater. If I was to overturn I guess I could have stood up and walked to shore.”
They went on standing together in the yard a few more moments, then Alice looked down at the book in her hands. “If it is a hole, and the birds are going on through it, I wonder what is on the other side.”
The wind drew a lock of hair across the girl’s face and she pushed it back and hooked it behind her ear. It was late in the afternoon and the sky had begun to redden above the black flaw. They both looked up at the hollow barking of gulls overhead, and watched without speaking as a flock of twelve or thirteen flew west and disappeared into the depths of the blackness.
From a thicket of arrowgrass in the salt marsh she watched a lumber ship half a mile off the point laboring into the bay, the white surf booming against the ship’s hull and decks. This was dusk at the end of a wet day, and a pair of whimbrels foraging in the mudflats were the only birds she had seen in an hour. Her attention drifted. She looked away, then back, and the big vessel at that moment heeled over suddenly with a terrible shrieking of metal. Two men in bright yellow anoraks, small as the end of her thumb from this distance, slid off the deck into the gray water and disappeared. She drew in a loud breath as if it might be possible to call them back, but the sound that came on the exhale was hollow and wordless.
There were other men staggering about on the ship—yellow warblers moving jerkily from branch to leaf came into her mind—and there must have been men in the wheelhouse far forward on the bow, men standing behind the dark, rain-streaked windows, though she could not see them, could not hear them shouting to one another. The ship leaned and settled—hard aground, listing onto its starboard side—and waves broke on it in great foaming sheets.
She stood up numbly and threw off the marsh cape, took the pistol from her coat pocket and fired it three times into the sky. In a few minutes, someone on the ship shot off a signal flare, its blurred yellow streak wobbling upward, arcing toward the black flaw and disappearing into it. The ship’s horn blared, blared again, and a third time.
With the last of the daylight failing, she began hurriedly to gather driftwood and pile it onto one of the mud islands in the marsh. Beach bonfires had been forbidden since the beginning of the war but this was all she knew to do, it was what peninsula people had done in the days when shipwrecks were common, bonfires on the beach to illuminate the darkness for any crewmen who might be able to swim to shore. The wood was sodden, too wet to light, and she was standing there in her mud-caked shoes, breathless with effort, thinking about the can of kerosene half a mile away in her camp, when something like a rumble of thunder shook the ground. The ship in the channel had gradually become invisible but for marker lights drowned intermittently by the breaking seas, but when she looked toward it a leaping glare lit up the whole mouth of the bay. For a startled moment she thought the wet driftwood had ignited, but it was something belowdecks on the ship—covert munitions, she would think later, carried with the lumber—that had begun to burn. The ship was very low in the water, leaning hard on its keel now, and swells were breaking over the upper deck, smothering it completely in gray foam and solid water. The fire shot up higher after every flood, and flames followed the oil out onto the glossy water and lifted upward in a yellow curtain.
She stood and watched men holding to the railings around the wheelhouse let go and drop and disappear into the water. Someone threw a Jacob’s ladder over the lee side and men began climbing down it. One of them was Tom—she knew him by his plaid mackinaw—Tom!—and then a swell broke over the ship in a solid white sheet and he vanished under the cataract. Other men climbed down behind him and were swept off, or jumped from the last rung and sank in the burning water. All of this occurred in silence, or seemed to, as the wind, and the roar of the flames, deafened her.
The burning ship lit up the sky. People living in Oysterville four miles away, and in hermit cabins along the bayshore, began to walk out of the darkness onto the firelit marsh, singly and in pairs, wading through the flood in their gum boots, until a dozen or better stood around her, staring and silent, or talking quietly. Someone asked what she had seen, and she shook her head, unable to speak.
After a while, a Coast Guard double-ended rescue boat came laboring out of the darkness into the glare. There was a lifesaving station near the North Cove lighthouse. She had only ever visited the station in summer—young men in white trousers, tight knit tops, white seamen’s caps, running rescue drills for small crowds of admiring tourists—but on the walls of the stationhouse there were photographs of wrecked clipper ships and of rescue boats breasting enormous crashing waves, photographs captioned “Heroes of the Surf,” and “Storm Warriors.” The Coast Guard boat, very small against the hugeness of the firestorm, came within a few hundred yards and then held off, rolling and pitching on the heavy sea. Several men came out of the forward cabin and shot a line across the water that fell short. They tried again, and a third time, a fourth, and then stood and watched the ship burn. The fire rose up in a great column of vivid orange and writhing black, and the wind took it all west into the starless hole in the sky.
After midnight, when the fire had burned down somewhat, the Coast Guard boat began to motor back and forth across the heavy swells, evidently searching for survivors or bodies in the water near the wreck. The tide, someone said, would likely take the bodies up the Naselle River to Raymond or North Bend, but nevertheless a few people began walking the bayshore in case any might wash up along the Point.
She searched in the arrowgrass and picked up her things from where she had dropped them—binoculars, notebook, the camouflage cape—and waded back across the marsh into the trees and found her tent in the darkness and lay down, shivering, in her wet clothes and then sat up and opened the Journal and by flashlight made an entry on the last page of Species Accounts.
Several times in the years since his death she had been visited by Tom, or rather Tom’s ghost. Once, just at dusk, she had seen him sitting below an oak tree alive with acorn woodpeckers, and when she called to him he turned and
grinned and made the purring sound a woodpecker makes in greeting its fellows. She came upon him suddenly in the narrow aisles of the Stanford library stacks, where he smiled slightly as if embarrassed and then turned into another aisle without speaking. On the peninsula, where heavy rain could turn the meadows and fields into an archipelago of islands, she had seen Tom crossing through the flooded tombstones of the Ocean Park cemetery, not walking on water but wading in his heavy hiking boots, raising a white surf that slapped against the stones. When she spoke to him he glanced back with a soft expression but did not reply.
None of this, of course, was real. A moment afterward, the person sitting under the oak was Claude Gerald who lived uphill from her parents’ house in St. Helena. In the library stacks, it was Benjamin Morse, a student in her botany class whose dark hair brushing the collar of his shirt was so much like Tom’s. The one she had seen crossing the flooded church yard was a young man who sold oysters on the pier at Nahcotta—she did not know his name—on his way to the feed store in Ocean Park.
After Tom drowned in the Spitzbergen estuary, but during the months when she had still believed him to be alive, she had been visited by vivid dreams of him, dreams that slipped away in the morning, beyond retrieve. It seemed to her that glimpses of Tom’s ghost must be fragments of those dreams, dreams she had thought irrecoverable, and a separate, nameless loss. She wrote down each sighting at the back of the Journal in Species Accounts, on the page set aside for uncommon birds, the page titled Incidental, Accidental, Rare.
When the night began to thin toward grayness, she put her notebook and Tom’s field guide in the knapsack and walked through the dark trees to the ocean beach.
Fog obliterated the headlands and the surf. In the half-light of dawn the flaw in the sky seemed to hang just overhead, a satiny black ribbon she felt she might stand on tiptoe and touch with an outstretched hand.
It was high tide, but there was a long black sedan parked on the beach. It seemed to her that the car would be lost to the ocean in the next quarter hour, and that the man who had driven it there was either unaware or unconcerned. He crouched behind a drift log out of the wind and fiddled with a small piece of machinery—a toy rocket ship, she thought, or a Roman candle.
She walked down to him through a dimpled field of plover nests. There were no more than a few dozen birds still remaining on Leadbetter beaches, and the nests on this part of the strand were unpopulated, empty of eggs. The man glanced up but said nothing, intent on his work. He had not shaved in recent days and his graying stubble—he was a man nearing sixty—was bright with beads of rain. She sat near him and opened the field guide to a blank page at the back, where Tom had drawn a few unidentified species, and she began to sketch the machine, which was not a toy: it stood like a white egret on tripod legs, its neck and bill pointed upward.
The surf came in around the man’s big car, lifted it, carried it west a few yards and dropped it. The motion caught his eye, and belatedly he woke to the situation and shuffled to his feet. By then the tires had already settled half a foot into the wet sand. He stood there, considering, and then shook his head and said, “Hell’s bells,” in a tone of disgust, and crouched down again with his machine.
In a short while he took a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, wrote a note, spindled it, and slid it inside the narrow beak of the egret.
She had come to the beach with an uncertain plan—had thought she might build a fire on the sand and send something—a letter? or even the field guide—in ash and smoke up to Tom. But now she tore a page from the back of the notebook and wrote a few lines. The world is hard, she wrote. But everything lives on. Even love. Even loneliness.
She folded the paper very small and held it out to the man. He barely glanced at her, took it without speaking and pushed it tightly into a cavity in the nose cone. Then he struck a match and lit a short piece of fuse and said offhandedly, “You should probably get farther back,” and they both stepped away fifteen or twenty feet. The rocket made a low grating or rasping noise—the sound certain gulls make, though she had not seen many gulls in recent days—and shot straight up, trailing white smoke and red sparks. They watched it rise through the gray sky and arc slightly and disappear through the rupture in the roof of their world.
Beautiful Boys
Theodora Goss
Theodora Goss [www.theodoragoss.com] was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. Her most recent book is The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-sided Love Story. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling awards.
You know who I’m talking about.
You can see them on Sunday afternoons, in places like Knoxville, Tennessee, or Flagstaff, Arizona, playing pool or with their elbows on the bar, drinking a beer before they head out into the dusty sunlight and get into their pickups, onto their motorcycles. Some of them have dogs. Some of their dogs wear bandanas around their necks. Some of them, before they leave, put a quarter into the jukebox and dance slowly with the waitresses, the pretty one and then the other one.
Then they drive or ride down the road, heading over the mountains or through the desert, toward the next town. And one of the waitresses, the other one, the brunette who is a little chubby, feels a sharp ache in her chest. Like the constriction that begins a panic attack.
“Beautiful Boys” is a technical as well as a descriptive term. Think of them as another species, Pueri Pulchri.
Pueri Pulchri cor meum furati sunt. The Beautiful Boys have stolen my heart.
They look like the models in cigarette ads. Lean, muscular, as though they can work with their hands. As though they had shaved yesterday. As though they had just ridden a horse in a cattle drive, or dug a trench with a backhoe.
They smell of aftershave and cigarette smoke.
That night, when she makes love to her boyfriend, who works at the gas station, the other waitress will think of him.
She and her boyfriend have been together since high school.
She will imagine making love to him instead of her boyfriend: the smell of aftershave and cigarettes, the feel of his skin under her hands, smooth and muscled. The rasp of his stubble as he kisses her. She will imagine him entering her and cry aloud, and her boyfriend will congratulate himself.
Afterward, she will stare into the darkness and cry silently, until she falls asleep on the damp pillow.
Would statistics help? They range from 5’11 to 6’2, between 165 and 195 pounds. They can be any race, any color. They often finish high school, but seldom finish college. On a college campus, they have almost unlimited access to what they need: fertile women. But they seldom stay for more than a couple of semesters.
They are more likely than human males to engage in criminal activities. They sell drugs, rob liquor stores and banks, but are seldom rapists. Sex, for them, is a matter of survival. They need to ensure that the seed has been implanted.
They seldom hold jobs for more than six months at a time. You can see them on construction sites, working as ranch hands, in video stores. Anything temporary.
They seldom marry, and those marriages inevitably end in desertion or divorce. They move on quickly.
They always move on. I believe that on this planet, their lifespan is approximately seven years. I have never seen a Beautiful Boy older than twenty-nine.
Oscar Guest is not his real name.
He had all the characteristics. Tall, brown skin, high cheekbones
: a mixture of Mexican and American Indian ancestry. Black hair pulled back into a ponytail, black eyes with the sort of lashes that sell romance novels or perfume. He was wearing a t-shirt printed with the logo of a rock band and faded jeans.
“I hear you’re paying $300 to participate in a study,” he said.
It’s a lot of money, particularly considering our grant. But we choose our test subjects carefully. They have to fit the physical and aesthetic criteria (male, 5’11”-6’2”, 165-195 pounds, unusually attractive). Even then, only about 2% of those we test are Beautiful Boys.
I could tell he was one of them at once. I’ve developed a sort of sensitivity. But of course that identification would have to be verified by testing.
Sometimes, the Beautiful Boy doesn’t move on immediately. Sometimes, he stays around after the dance. He gets a job in construction, starts dating the pretty waitress. If she insists, they might even get married.
By the time he leaves, she’s pregnant.
As far as we know, Beautiful Boys mate and reproduce like human males. Based on anecdotal evidence, we suspect they’re superior lovers, but that data has not been verified. We are writing a grant to study their reproductive cycle. However, we are still at the stage of identifying them, of convincing the general population that they are here, among us—an alien species.
We always perform the standard tests: blood tests, skin and hair analysis. Beautiful Boys are physiologically identical to human males, but show a higher incidence of drug use. They typically have lower body fat, more lean muscle. I have known some to live on a diet of Cheetos and beer. They don’t need to diet or exercise. It’s as though their metabolism is supercharged.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 Page 21
