Mother of Crows

by David Rodriguez

  As the conversation continued, Abby watched the monster eat out of the corner of her eye, perversely fascinated by how he might manage. He brought a forkful of beef up to his face. Abby held her breath, certain he was going to just throw it into the fleshy whirlpool of his mouth. A bright purple tongue snaked out of his mouth. One side of it was covered in clear spines. The tongue wrapped around the food and slithered back into the monster’s mouth.

  She screamed, and turned it into a laugh. The whole table went silent. A couple of nearby students turned their heads. There it was, the crazy girl going crazy again.

  Bryce blinked. “Didn’t think the joke was that funny.”

  Abby did her best to roll with it. “No, I get it. ‘Because they’re short.’”

  Sindy shook her head at Abby: Don’t be so desperate. Meanwhile, over Sindy’s shoulder, Eleazar the fish monster continued his bizarre and horrifying meal.

  After lunch, she went to her final period classes, and managed to get through both of them without another incident. She felt proud of herself for keeping everything under control. What would her friends do in this situation? Nate would probably try to study them. And with Sindy’s taste in corny supernatural TV, she’d probably attempt to slay them or romance them.

  Still, as proud as she felt, Abby knew she couldn’t exist in this strange new world without some form of guidance. There was one person here with answers, and their conversation yesterday was definitely unfinished… but most of that haste had been in service of getting her out of the school as quickly as possible, hadn’t it? Many questions remained unasked and unanswered. She needed to understand what was going on.

  Could she talk to Mr. Harris?

  10

  History in Biology

  Abby wondered if talking about the monsters was some form of taboo in monster culture, if they had one. Humans had plenty of problems getting along with each other, and this was a whole different species. No. Not a species. Mr. Harris had lectured about taxonomies today. The monsters were at least a whole different order, if not a class of their own.

  That was an excuse. She could ask him what he was. Scientifically. He was a teacher and a monster, but he was paid for being a teacher. He must have wanted to educate people. This would be the biggest lesson of them all, wouldn’t it?

  She had to psych herself up. Despite the fact that Abby knew Mr. Harris better than any of her other teachers so far, and the fact she had spent the better part of an hour studying him during a lecture, all of the monsters still frightened her. They were hideous in a way that she found viscerally repulsive. She wondered if her disgust was mere mammalian dislike for anything too alien, or if it was some deeply buried genetic memory from a time when the two races had been in conflict.

  The halls emptied out at the end of the day. The locals went back into town-or more likely, their estates around town-while the kids who lived on campus returned to their dorms. Nate found Abby in the hall.

  “Want to walk home?”

  “No, I need to talk to Mr. Harris.”

  “About yesterday?”

  She smiled. “Yeah.”

  “All right. Text me if you want to talk.”

  “Thanks,” she told him, and meant it.

  She went to Mr. Harris’ room, and was simultaneously relieved and disappointed that he was busy writing on his chalkboard. She wanted to speak to him, but she dreaded the actual speaking. She stood in the doorway, trying to think of what to say. The chalk squeaked and tapped as he wrote.

  “What can I do for you, Abby?” Mr. Harris said without turning around.

  “I wanted… I needed… to talk. About yesterday.”

  “Close the door, please.”

  Her dread returned on clammy wings. Abby forced herself to step into the classroom, pulling the door shut as she did. She lingered near it for a moment. Mr. Harris had had his chance to kill her yesterday. Today, too, she supposed. Nothing had changed. Working up her courage, she walked to her seat and got up onto the stool. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  Mr. Harris turned, as though that was what he’d been waiting for, and regarded her with expressionless eyes. Abby hooked her heels onto the bottom rung of her stool, feeling more and more like a child as the silence stretched between them.

  Finally, she just blurted it out: “What are you?”

  He chuckled. It was chilling just how human it sounded. “We are called the Croatans.” The word took on an aquatic quality as his odd mouth formed the word. The accent sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Is that like the Croatoan tribe? From Roanoke?” Her history teacher had mentioned them this morning during an overview of the American colonial period.

  “There is some overlap in our histories, yes. But our… tribe chose a different path.”

  “Is that… Do other people call you Croatans, too?”

  “No. That is a word that belongs exclusively to us. Other names directed at us have been less than complimentary. Of them all, ‘Gillman’ is probably the least offensive.”

  “And you call us?”

  “Humans. Were you expecting something else?”

  She shrugged. “Kind of.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. We usually just call you by name. We’ve gotten to know you well enough over the years that it’s more about individual people than whole races.”

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “We think so.”

  “Are there many of you?”

  “Not as many as there once were.”

  “How come no one knows about you?”

  “We work hard to keep it that way. Humans outnumber us by millions to one. Were we ever discovered, genocide would be the inevitable result.” Mr. Harris sounded reasonable as he spoke, but a touch of sadness had crept into his voice by the end.

  “Genocide? Not everyone.”

  “No, not everyone, but enough. It wouldn’t take the entire population of the planet to turn on us. A small and determined force could eradicate us if they chose to. We lack the capacity to effectively defend ourselves against such aggression. “

  “You have your disguises. Whatever it is you call that.”

  “Yes, we have that. It’s our only defense, really. Hiding.”

  Abby nodded. It pretty much said it all. They had to hide. The alternative was death. Though she believed that genocide wasn’t quite as inevitable as Mr. Harris was framing it, she certainly understood his fear and the danger.

  “How can I see through it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Harris said.

  “Has it ever happened before?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it, but in the sweeping scope of history, human and Croatan, I would imagine it must have. It’s said the legends of mermaids and Medusa came from us originally.”

  “You’ve been around that long?”

  “We’ve existed as long as you have.” Something in the way he said this-too evenly, too monotone-suggested he was lying, but she couldn’t understand how or where.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Humanity evolved on land. When the climate changed in eastern Africa, the woodlands dried out, and your ancestors came down from the trees and into the newly-formed plains. In the deep places of the ocean, something similar happened. The currents grew colder. Food became harder to find. My ancestors were the smart ones. They banded together to find new sources of food.”

  “What do you eat?”

  “It would disgust you.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  He sighed. It was almost funny coming out of his lamprey mouth. “Dead whales are considered a staple. Sort of like potatoes and wheat are to you.”

  “Ugh.”

  “I told you it would disgust you.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t judge. But if you eat whales, what are you doing on land? We don’t exactly have whales down on Main Street.”

  He chuckled again. “No, you don’t. But you have art, and music, and books, and televis
ion.”

  “And you don’t.”

  He shook his head.

  “Your entire race crawled out of the ocean so they could watch cable?”

  “Not all of them. Some just go to the movies.”

  Abby giggled. “What do they watch?”

  “You’d have to ask them. I’m here because I enjoy reading, and I enjoy teaching.”

  “Do you ever think you’ll tell the world what you really are?”

  “Probably not. But it’s enough that one person knows, and she is not running and screaming.”

  “Thank you for talking to me, Mr. Harris.”

  “My pleasure. You should go now. And make sure you get your reading done tonight. This conversation does not count as extra credit.”

  She gave him a genuine smile then, and left her strange biology teacher alone in his classroom.

  11

  Interlude with Mr. Harris

  Mr. Harris stood behind his desk, motionless, his head cocked as he listened to Abby disappear up the hall. Sound carried strangely above the water, but he was accustomed to it. He had spent most of his life on land, and now the world underwater was a cacophony.

  Abby’s footsteps carried toward the Academy’s front exit, and he was pleased to note they had lightened considerably in the time between her arrival in his classroom and her departure. Some lies, some truth, and enough of each to comfort the poor girl. He understood how she felt. The first time he’d seen a human, he had been disgusted and horrified. He still could not watch them eat.

  He waited a little longer, pinpointing the individual locations of the few people still in the building. He felt Mr. Treach, the janitor, sweeping the hall. Ms. Tessier was in her room, though infrequent movement indicated that she was probably seated. A door opened at the far end of the hall and someone went through it too quickly to be identified.

  Satisfied he was alone, Mr. Harris took his phone from his pocket and dialed.

  “Yes?” said a toneless voice on the other end.

  “Abigail Thorndike came to see me.”

  “And what is her mood?”

  “I calmed her.”

  “How?”

  “I spoke with her.”

  “And you told her…”

  “Nothing that can hurt us. She should not be a problem anymore.”

  “Good.” The phone clicked and the voice at the other end was gone.

  Harris pocketed his phone as his mind spun with thoughts of Abby Thorndike and her future.

  12

  Late

  Several weeks had passed since the incident in the hallway. Abby was still the crazy new girl, but she wasn’t getting as many looks, and fewer conversations died out as she approached. Some of that was due to a very messy soap opera unfurling between four juniors. Some of it was due to her association with Bryce and his group, though that, too, brought along its own baggage. Nate still disliked Bryce, though he took fewer opportunities to sulk about it now than he had at the beginning of the school year.

  She’d adjusted to the sight of the croatans around town, so much so that she had taken to calling them ‘crows’. She saw them at school. She saw them on the weekend, when she, Nate, and Sindy had gone to the one movie theater downtown. She saw them in her own home. Still, there was nothing she could do about the revulsion that swept over her when she saw them. She had tried mentally scolding herself for being some new kind of racist, and once, she’d asked Nate what you’d call a person that was racist against aliens. (“A xenophobe,” he’d said cheerfully, without asking why she wanted to know.) She’d hoped familiarity would blunt the horror. She thought knowing what they were might make it go away. They were just too alien, too odd. If their physicality wasn’t enough, their shadows, not obeying any law of reality as she knew it, would have been enough.

  She was able to hide her disgust. So far, that was enough.

  Mr. Harris never mentioned anything about being a crow, and she had the impression that things were normal between the two of them. None of the other creatures ever reacted to her except…

  Except maybe Bertram. She couldn’t be sure. Some days, she thought she was being paranoid. Others, she thought he might be looking at her more closely than usual. Maybe she’d just started to notice the man who had shared her home for her entire life.

  Other than the monsters, things were fine. Abby always laughed when she thought of it that way, but it was true. She was living a pretty normal life buried in homework with new friends.

  Until a conversation with Delilah. They were in the bathroom and Abby was washing her hands, thinking about a looming test in English on Stephen Crane. Delilah came in, looking sick.

  “Hey Abs,” she said as she went to the sink. “You don’t have any Aleve, do you?”

  “Yeah, of course.” Abby opened up her bag and dug out her bottle. She shook a couple out, and Delilah took them with a bottle of water.

  “Thanks. I’m sorry, cramps are kicking my ass, and I didn’t realize I was out.”

  Abby smiled. She found it impossible not to like Delilah and her very non-WASPy way of speaking. Constance would die before she said the word ‘cramps’ out loud. Hester might combust.

  “No problem, um, Del.” Abby winced at the awkwardness of the nickname. Laze, Del… She didn’t know who gave out the nicknames in Bryce’s group, but she felt lucky she’d got stuck with ‘Abs.’

  Delilah returned smiled back, then grimaced in pain. “This had better kick in soon or I’m totally sitting out during P.E. If Coach Teague has a problem with it he can kiss my big, lily-white ass.” She disappeared into a stall, and Abby left the restroom, still smiling.

  Poor Delilah, she thought. She had nothing but sympathy for the girl. Abby’s cramps were the stuff of legend, and she had lost more than one Saturday lying on her bed with a hot water bottle over her tummy. She had been lucky these last couple months. Not a single one.

  Wait.

  She thought back. No, that couldn’t be right. She went over it again and again. Still nothing. She hadn’t had a cramp because she hadn’t had her period. She thought back to the last time she’d had it. A few weeks before school started. That had been one of the worst. The cramps had ripped through her to the point she couldn’t imagine childbirth being all that much different. She wasn’t due. She was overdue.

  Stress? Couldn’t that make you skip your period? She thought she remembered reading that somewhere. Sindy would know.

  Abby put it out of her mind for the rest of the day until dismissal. She found Sindy at her locker getting her things to go home. “Hey Sindy. Do you have a ride home today?”

  “Nope. Driver took Mom into Boston. New fall fashions, so I get to walk.”

  “Want to walk with me?”

  “Sure.”

  Nate found them. “Hey.”

  Abby quailed. She didn’t want Nate around for this. She didn’t really want anyone around for this. “Hey, Nate. I need to talk to Sindy. You know, in private.”

  Nate frowned. “Private?”

  “Yeah,” Sindy said. “We need to talk about menstruation. You see, once a month the lining on the uterine wall sheds…”

  “Stop! Stop,” Nate said, hands over his ears. “I got the picture. I’ll see you guys tomorrow, and have fun with your, um…”

  “Periods.”

  Nate scurried off.

  Sindy laughed. “So, what are we really talking about?”

  “Um… menstruation.”

  “Ew! Seriously? I was just trying to get rid of him.”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “I thought it was going to be about Bryce.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Yeah, might as well pass the Bechdel Test.” Sindy hoisted her backpack and Abby followed her out. A steady line of cars circled around the front drive, picking up the locals. Abby and Sindy joined the straggly exodus across the lawn. They were quiet until they reached the first turn, and turned up the hill toward Harwich Hall. “So, were you goi
ng to talk?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” Abby mumbled. “I’m… I guess the term is ‘late.’”

  “Late? As in late-late?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Sometimes, I forget just how sheltered you are.”

  “You’ve met my mom.”

  “I’ve also met me.”

  Abby shrugged.

  “Okay, so when you say you’re late, how late are you?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Maybe you’re pregnant!” Sindy laughed.

  Abby felt her eyes bulging. “What? I’m a virgin!”

  “I know. I mean, I thought maybe…”

  “Maybe what?”

  “You know, the night of the carnival.”

  “What happened? What happened the night of the carnival?” Abby was scared by the urgency in her voice, but she couldn’t stop it.

  “Whoa. Calm down.”

  “I’m sorry, I just… I don’t remember much after the funhouse and what I do remember doesn’t make much sense.” Abby paused. “Do you remember that night?”

  Now Sindy blushed. It was an odd sight, not in the least because she so seldom did. Sindy made it a practice not to be embarrassed by anything she said or did. “I don’t remember much, either.”

  “And you don’t think that’s at all weird?”

  “Well I was drinking. So I figured that’s why I couldn’t…” Sindy shrugged. “But you didn’t touch a drop.”

  “You must remember something if you thought I might not be a virgin.”

  “Well, yeah. But it was after we left the carnival. We went looking for you because it was shutting down and you were sitting just outside the funhouse. You didn’t say anything, I figured you were still upset, but you came with us.”

  “Where did we go?”

  Sindy’s brow furrowed as she struggled to recapture the events of that evening. “We all went to the parking lot out by the Fisherman’s Lodge.”

  Fisherman’s Lodge was a bar near the river delta, supposedly the midpoint between the people who fished on the river and those who fished on the ocean. It was a fake log cabin, and the parking lot was so sprawling it went off into the woods. Plenty of trees grew all around it, and there were sections entirely shielded from both the road and the bar. Teenagers went to drink there all the time. “I don’t know what happened exactly. I think Hunter handed me a bottle-I guess it could have been Ben or Laze-and I was about to hand it to… someone. I don’t know. And then I saw you off to the side. I mean… I saw your back.”