The Dammerung
by Macaulay C. Hunter
Copyright 2012 Macaulay C. Hunter
Smashwords Edition
Cover photo courtesy of Jenny Downing
Cover by Joleene Naylor
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
Thecha - N. E. 276/Dammerung 0
It was no gentle tapping, soft slip of feather or brush of wing. At the sudden scrabbling, she lurched forward in the balsa and dug her hands into her belly, hoping to hook an elbow or knee, offer an indent to a blind bite of gums.
Mua looked at her fingers crawling down the tight curl of her abdomen. She knotted her thighs, and he turned away to paddle quick infinities back to shore.
He opened his eyes but they were already open and burning, grit rolling under his lids when he blinked them shut, catching and tugging at the dry skin of his corneas when he scrubbed at them with the flat of his palms.
He breathed, a shocked, desperate inhale. His chest constricted around a heavy gush that was not air, he forced it out and gobbled in more. Sinking to his knees, he pawed at his mouth to clear it, slumped onto his side and drew his knees close. His eyes bulged open, seeing no form or color or shape, and abruptly, there was air. It rode in on one agonal hitch, and then he unfolded his legs to drink at it fully with his mouth stinging. It was rank with smoke and a tattered ribbon of something terrible riding along its underside, but it was air.
Color burst at him by the third breath, a tumult of knuckled, yellowish green legs punching up from a hash of brown floor, a flurry of deep green tongues wagging beneath heads of honey and purple hair. He cringed as they bent over him, licking dry scrapes up his arm, and then they retreated to an agitated huddle above. A single blue eye, almost completely shaded by tangles of hair, took no notice.
He was surrounded. They bent again and rubbed at him, then drew back. The eye did not focus. He turned, muscle by breath, until he was on his stomach. Once more they touched him and lifted, undecided, and he slithered forward an inch, another, and froze when they bent over him and fell away. He slid his arms in front, fingers digging into the loose, crumbly floor until he found traction, and dragged himself.
More legs. More tongues. More tousles of hair. Occasional eyes. He moved down a channel between two rows of legs, and he could see many more rows behind them. After a while he got onto his knees and crawled. The tongues only questioned at his skin, the eyes never focused or the legs moved, and eventually he stood. Reaching out to a faceless head, jutting out like the others at a strange angle, he ran his fingers down cool, papery skin. Part of the skin was missing just under a thatching of purple hair, and a small copper bulge gleamed in its absence.
He tore at the light green peelings and shoved the end of the ear of corn into his mouth, biting and swallowing, not chewing. He ate the filaments when he could not scuff them away fast enough. He gnawed at the skeleton when it was all that was left, threw it aside, and ripped another from the stalk. Acid churned up into his mouth from a stomach too ravenous to wait. He stripped it of its sheath and realized the smell was still there, a suggestion of rancid in a declaration of smoke.
After eating the raw, unripe meat from the cob, he dropped it with a flick of his wrist. His watch was gone. He looked at his wrist in disbelief, but it was gone, even the tan line. Kicking at the piling he had made on the ground, looking back the way he had come, he did not spot it.
He was in a cornfield, and he did not know what time it was.
He had to get out now, right now before dusk fell, and find cover! But there were no signs to an exit. He had never been in the fields, in any field, he had only seen them once on a career video Farming…Is It For You?, in which stultifying pan-sweeps over the fields and the droning voiceover of an agricultural worker convinced him that it wasn’t.
Every direction trailed into a smear of green. The corn reached high over his head, and the sun was not in view. In the east and he would not have a problem. But the day felt old, used up, the spent blue of the sky where it was not white or gray meaning it was afternoon, possibly late afternoon, and he was in the fields.
Shore I been stung, the gnarled agricultural worker said, a hunnerd times. It was the only part of the video that lifted them from fifth period stupor, amidst freeze shots of tractors and flow charts of innovations in Earth irrigation. Their eyelids lifted in sleepy mockery of hunnerd and were settling back to quarter-inch noddings when the agricultural worker rolled up his sleeve.
“Take it off, baby!” Yushua cheered, to giggling and a warning rumble, as the camera moved in. Everyone fell silent at the knobbed scars protruding all over from his bicep like heads of nails.
Just gotta be in before dusk, he said. Don’t be eager at dawn.
The air changed from rancid to a thicker, soupier texture, and his lungs gave a warning heave. It was coming from behind, so he wouldn’t head that way. Breaking into a jog, he ran down the channel and pushed into another row to see if the vantage was better. The air lightened, returned to the manageable recoil of smoke and that other, undefined smell. It was growing stronger, but he could deal with it, just as long as it wasn’t that poison, and then he saw the hand. “Hello?”
He felt the word go out of him, the thrust of air around the syllables, the burn on his palate. But he could not hear his voice. Until then, this had had the telescopic focus of a bad dream, but the hand did not jerk at his unheard voice. It should have flickered up, attached itself to the arm of a figure saying something nonsensical. He would fly away over a gibberish of images and wake up in bed. But the hand stayed, splayed in the dirt, a thick gold band on the fourth finger. A parenthesis of dirt opened under each blanched nail to a scattering of large red freckles along the flesh on the back of the hand, bracketed by shredded dark material of a sleeve over the wrist.
“Mister?” he asked, feeling the vibration along his tongue and in his ears. There was the slightest trembling at the pad of the thumb, and he pushed into the next row to the form huddled there.
Sometime later, sound came back with the same dizzying explosion as color. The cornfield had scooped up into a hill toward a cooling sky, and he climbed step after step, leaving stickiness of sick on the plants he grasped for support. Just as he stepped onto an impression of road in the dirt, two parallel ruts leading each way, and noticed the first flank of yet another cornfield on the other side, a detonation went off behind him. He whirled around and saw the pockmarked, mountainous jeekes behind him (east, he was headed east) and screamed at the blasting in his ears, the hot gale that nearly whipped him from his feet, the jeekes falling in. The thud of one cliff layer falling into the next, the heavier thud of both layers piling onto the third, the reverberation as they nose dived in on the next. Smoke and dust flew up over the setting sun, just above where the top layer of the jeekes had once been. He could still hear it, behind the brown congestion of the air, the jigsaw of the jeekes collapsing.
He also heard the humming after the smoke blotted the sun from view. They were waking up. He bolted down the road, his skin tingling with the hum all around.
Yushua had pierced his ear with a serrate during Basic Composition. The acquisition of the serrate had resulted in his permanent dismissal from lab section, and the perforation of his lobe had finished him for the only other class in which he was still enrolled. Residual poison in the serrate, which he had not removed from his ear after poking all the way through it, numbed the left side of his face to a drooling slackness, the right side drawn up in lopsided cheer at the screaming, the blood, and the strong-arm the teacher used to push him out the door.
A small figure shot out of the corn and across the road to the other field. Avan ran.
Fong had wanted to be a flopper for Costume Day, and Avan made the serrate out of cardboard covered in gray tape, a foot long and rippled with nasty looking serra. It kept falling off the headpiece, the faceted eyes nudging it loose, faceted, one of Zoo’s words, until he cut a hole in the plastic and wedged it through. The wings were easier, the flying gray lengths made of sheets stretched over his shoulders by a thin wire frame, and the breeding set (red, Fong always picked red) dangling free to his knees. Avan had been a flopper himself years before, but his costume was store bought, with a wind up noise pack that would hum. He’d done the best he could with what was in the house, and Fong was content to do the humming himself.
“We’ll save it for Sadie,” he told Zoo, tucking the costume into a box with a picture of Fong wearing it, smile stained orange with the candy he vomited all over himself in bed that night.
The humming of the floppers resonated down to the recoiling marrow in his bones, rattled at his teeth. It was growing louder, and soon the swarms would lift over the corn and drop on him. They had watched Flopper Attacks during one of those endless nights when he was bottling fussy Sadie, and witnessed the hapless secondary characters being taken down while the muscled main character and her strategically-undressed male companion had thrust their way through the buzzing hell unscathed.
“Follow them, I hear they live,” Avan stage-whispered to Zoo. It wasn’t funny now, that dumb made-for-telly movie, because he wasn’t the main character of anything, even less someone’s sexy consort, just a boy in a field who was going to die if he didn’t find cover. Avan had nothing that an inch-and-a-half long serrate could not pierce straight through with a quick and evil efficiency.
A second and third figure jumped into the air, and he could see them now, bodies crowded on flapping leaves, warming up their wings to join the humming roar. In the darkened light, spangles of half-grown amber, turquoise, and red breeding wings refracted off the blue eyes on the corn. He hurtled down the road as it sloped down to a building.
The hum reached a new pitch, sending electric shocks into the balls of his feet, up his legs and trunk, the hairs of his body standing straight up. He reached a new speed when the road rounded to the side and the cornfield there fell away to a cut of strata going straight down with the road curving under it, and there was the building, there was the building, there was the building!
Floppers jumped into the air, lifting from the rusted tractor, a piling of tires, the span of dirt and wizened grass that spread out in a skirt of neglect around the building. The road became so steep that his legs were pinwheeling, his chest leaning forward dangerously, but he could not fall, he didn’t care if he fell at his wedding or holding the baby or with a tray of sandwiches in front of a conference of 1s, he could not fall now. His mind fixed on the details of the door, the knob, no window, one step up to a porch covered in a rubber mud catcher, the kickings of dried dirt on the bottom third of the pale green paint. The humming changed to buzzing, and the airborne floppers began to swirl. He leapt up the step and fell heavily on the door, his fingers sliding, finding purchase, turning the knob.
It was locked.
He turned it once more in disbelief and then threw himself at the door, screaming, shaking, the sound lost not because he couldn’t hear again, but the buzzing had grown that loud. Jumping off the step, he ran around the back of the building but there was only a garage door with a heavy metal cover, and that was locked too. He whirled around to a sky black with insects and gray with smoky dusk, and almost missed the trailer in his panic.
He was going to be like that man in the field.
No. An old cream-and-dirt ‘Yago was there, wheels stuck in muddy ruts, an empty laundry line stretched from an antenna to a pole. The floppers dived down. He went into the trailer and rolled hysterically on the tiny space of the floor, beating at his face and arms, slamming the door shut, the slap-slap of floppers striking the other side.
Carcasses rained down when he stood. There were more floppers in the dark of the trailer, he could hear them, and he ran his hands over the walls for a light switch. They dove and he fought silently so that they would not fly back into his mouth, his tongue numbing as he swatted and crushed and backed into a cabinet to kill one gouging his back. The fingers of his left hand were cold and still, and he whacked flaccidly at a flopper sawing at his ear. He banged his ear into his shoulder and heard a crunch. They left him to regroup.
He found a switch, but no light dazzled the floppers into sleep. No electricity, and there was that smell again. The trailer was almost black but he could make out a form on the bed, a settled heap in the kitchen area. The smell couldn’t matter, because there was nowhere else to go.
Attached to the wall was a familiar shape, cubed plastic with a ribbed nozzle. As they covered him with the dry pullings of their legs and began to pierce, he ripped the safety key. The discharge knocked him flat against the cabinets and temporarily lit the inside of the trailer. The can jerked from his hands and fell, spinning on a table and plunging to the floor, where it smacked into a chair and careened to the bed. The floppers dropped and died. He jumped to his feet and stomped on them, spraying spit from his slackening mouth. Light and gas fizzed with one last eruption from the can, and then there was silence. The floppers outside backed away. Avan stood there, shaking. The smell!
In the flash of light, he’d seen a round tube on the table. It was a flashlight. He guided the bright yellow light to the bed and the outthrust of leg was just a twist of blanket, the bulge of head only a lumpy puff pillow. His feet broke the backs of floppers before the huddle by a small food cooler.
“Momma,” Avan said from fear. Magazines. Only magazines. The smell was from the food cooler, but there was no electricity. It was just the smell of rotten meat, nothing more. He pressed his arms around him like an answering hug and sobbed, too thirsty to make tears. Turning on the faucet, no water gushed out. There were crackers in a cabinet, but only water would do.
The toilet. Thin skids disappeared into the bend. As he reached out in disgust and despairing, the light fell on the tank. The water there was clean, or was for a toilet. Unbelievingly, he watched his hand go into the cold water and he drew it up to his lips. It tasted so good that it hurt. Then he fell on the bed, with the flashlight clutched to his side like a stuffed boar teddy. The flashlight was solid and friendly. He breathed lightly of the foul air.
The bed had a musty smell when he buried his nose in it, but better than the smell of perished tuna, milk curdled with cheesy white droppings. He thought of that popped man in the field, seething with the larval bodies of insects. No. He would leave after the dawn scurrup, find a road, and get home. Zoo had Sadie and Fong, Becky and Thecha, and Becky would be no help with the little ones. He had no idea how he had gotten here, in this cornfield, but he had to get home.
Every time he closed his eyes, the darkness wiggled.
But he had to get to work in the morning! The movers and shakers of Grayson Limited needed their sandwich boy. They were blimps, with stuccoes of sticky notes in melted layers all over their cubes, their computers vanished under with heavy, spilling files, and chairs groaning at the thick seal of posture comfort seat pillows pushing at the slats. Some called down to Mr. Grocer for his ‘Wichin Chips, number one, two, or three; others called for one and two, or two and three, (usually not one and three), and the rest ordered the Sampler, which was one, two, and three all together, a mass of a meal.
Mr. Grocer was tired of them calling down one, two, then three times in a morning to make a single order each time, so that the uniformly fat people in nearby cubes would not hear them ordering three meals all at once, even though many others were doing the same. So he added the Sampler to the menu. The movers oooh’ed over the Sampler’s print ‘three finger sandwiches, tuna on rye, peanut butter on whole wheat, boar strips on white with mustard, a square of buttered cornbread with thinly-sliced Earth ham on the side and a full-size neighbor bag of chips, large soda and bottled water included.’ The shakers picked up their phones right away to call downstairs.
Avan always did the “trash included!” service as well, and he knew not one of them shared the neighbor size bags of chips. Trash was included because movers and shakers felt bad at the mountain of wrappings that crested over their trashcans, slowly pickling in the afternoon hours, it made them feel like they had gorged. The three “finger” sandwiches were almost the same size as the single-orders, not just-for-taste servings. Water didn’t dilute soda; corn in the bread didn’t make cornbread healthy.
When a mover or shaker told him off at the wait, saying his metabolism would change too or pondering with jealousy that it must be his genes, he fantasized in the service elevator about telling them that he did not have a political or economic or social opinion worth two cents, he did not tap at a computer or make important phone calls, and he did not have a crucial business meeting with the Bureau-Elect at four-thirty sharp. He didn’t even have a high school diploma. But his pants weren’t stretch, his shirt buttoned cleanly, and that it had nothing to do with metabolism or genes, it had to do with the fact that he didn’t stuff himself with starch and sugar for hours. If they didn’t like the wait, then they could waddle down the staircase to the counter and get immediate service instead of giving Avan the workout for them. Maybe they figured it was exercise by proxy, but you’d think people with plaques and commendations in their cubicles could figure out their weight loss plan had hit a plateau.
It was sad, but they were 2s. When he was Becky’s age, Avan resented seeing their school buses go by on another field trip to the jeekes or the Capitol. Now when he saw them, he felt sorry for the kids inside, because those blue Promise buses led to nowhere but posture comfort pillows and Avan’s laden food tray. It was funny, through the eyes of a kid and then the eyes of a workingman, how different the same things looked. When Becky sneered that one day he would be serving her sandwiches, he could only smile at her gently.
A man on the fifth floor one day ordered two Samplers, and told Mr. Grocer they were for a meeting. Avan had learned the gentle smile from Mr. Grocer. “Of course, they’re very popular for meetings,” Mr. Grocer said, so that the man could feel enormously clever, and then he had that smile as he hung up. Avan never had a father, but in the eleven months he worked there, Mr. Grocer had become one. When Avan dropped out of school and went to the Skyline seeking a job, most places blew him off for being too young. But Mr. Grocer gave him a chance three days a week from nine to four-thirty, paid under the table. He did food prep from the start of his shift to eleven, he delivered meals until three, and after that he cleaned up. Other workers complained about their tasks, but Avan wasn’t being paid to enjoy mopping the floor, he didn’t filch supplies, and he stayed employed while the others were fired for absences or making themselves sandwiches for free.
“I need this job,” he said when they offered chips. “I got a baby.”
“I count on that boy,” Mr. Grocer said. Avan never forgot it, that Mr. Grocer counted on him, a commendation better than any 2 had framed in a cubicle. He hadn’t explained it right to Zoo, she wasn’t as impressed, but Avan kept that plaque in his heart and looked at it on the rail home, his money folded in his wallet and his hand in his pocket to protect it. He loved handing money to Zoo, knowing their next food emergency wouldn’t be an emergency. That made him feel like a man.
His friend Neddy dropped out of school days after Avan, who got him a job with Mr. Grocer, too. The money Neddy made went to vid games and down bi-boarding flumes, but Avan used his to take care of his family, he could buy Fong a bounce ball or Sadie a little outfit, he could give Zoo a fake/real rose allowed in city lines since it was synthetic enough to not attract mites but real enough to pulse and slowly die. When the money ran out before Jean’s next payday, Zoo removed the bills tucked into a pair of her old maternity pants and they shopped for groceries to tide them over. So Avan wasn’t going to blow his job stealing chips. He had to get to work tomorrow!
But his body was swelling. There were lumps on his chest that didn’t hurt yet. His left hand was so numb he couldn’t move his fingers; they itched, coldly. Lying down was making the bulges on his back throb, and his right shoulder was freezing into paralysis. And his face, he’d been stung in the eye. He couldn’t remember it, but he shivered when he forced his right arm up, heavily, and ran his fingers over the pulpy slop. No flopper bites on his throat, a relief, since he didn’t have antihistamines.
The humming dropped to a murmuring, then to a whisper, and it died. He clambered out of the bed, drank more from the toilet tank, and opened the door. In ungainly loads, he carried the spoiled food from the cooler and dumped it outside. A crescent moon sailed across the deep blue of the sky, dodging trenches of smoke in unbroken lines from the jeekes.
On the third trip, his thighs warmed with wet. He’d peed himself. Dumping slippery plastic wrappings of stinking meat by the garage door, he returned to the trailer. There had to be a change of clothes in the cupboards under the bed, and he was in too much discomfort from flopper bites to be angry with himself over pissing his pants. Hair swung in front of his face. His hair was longer.
The clothes may have belonged to the man in the field. No. Fresh liquid spilled. Something wasn’t right with his body and he went to the mirror above the sink. His reflection wavered in the cracked glass, and he squinted with his one good eye. Light splintered in the broken bits and made it hard to see himself. A jumble of bottles and tubes edged the circle of sink when he lowered the light. Some he recognized, a hydro-based cort cream that he could rub on the bites, disinfectants. He let the dead weight of his right shoulder pin the flashlight to his side, and carefully scooped up what he needed. Shuffling to the bed, he dropped it to the mattress and worked on his clothes.
The shirt was buttoned, it wasn’t his, and impossible to remove with the fingers of a hand now numbed past the elbow. He fumbled at the buttons, and then yanked at one side. The exertion let loose yet another stream from his bladder, which headed down both legs. He worked at the button on the pants with no more success than the shirt, but he could at least do the zipper. Shambling to the toilet, he thought better of it and went to the door. Just because he wasn’t thirsty enough now to drink skid water didn’t mean he wouldn’t be later.
Reaching into the yawn of the undone zipper, he couldn’t find the y-front. Frustrated, his nails scratched over the skin of his underwear. He tugged at the top of the elastic, and forced his fingers under the thigh band. His penis was gone. In alarm, he groped at himself, sifted through the hair, popped open the button of the pants. He yanked the pants and underwear down, ground his stiff muscles out of the clothes, toward the bed and flashlight. It made a yellow circle on his skin, empty.
He screamed.
Fong had a dollar tucked into his Maktyl Pterodactyl wallet with the bubble wing clips tied to his belt loop. He opened his wallet again to make sure the dollar was still there, and Mama said, “Fongie, stop, you’re going to lose it.”
They had a lot to do today, starting with the rail since Mama couldn’t drive any more. Mama missed her car. Fong had never ridden the rail and he was excited, bouncing in his wheelchair. “Out of Earth’s primordial ooze, DINOSAURAE!”
“Ssshhh!” she said into her purse. At cartoon time, the TV went green, and then a tremble, a ripple, a bubble, a froth, and then . . .
“DINOSAURAE!” he shrieked. Mama put down her purse.
“People are looking,” she said. “If you can’t calm down, I will take you back to Half-Light.”
“Can I hold my token?”
Two gold coins disappeared snap into her palm. “You can hold the map.” The map! There was a screeching and Fong kept the delighted scream inside as a giant silver lead car barreled past the waiting area and slowed so the cars behind lined up perfectly with yellow stepping squares at the doors. There was a red car. He pointed.
“We’ll see,” Mama said. A steamy hiss whistled the doors open, and people boiled out, boiled in, and Mama put her hands on the prongs of Fong’s wheelchair and started running. People were punted aside right and left like balloons at a party. Then they were in the green car, and Fong didn’t complain. It was the color of primordial ooze. There was a time he would have cried over red, but not today. Green could be primordial ooze, and blue could be the pterodactyl’s sky he flew in.
Mama panted in her seat and he said, “We’re in the ooze! That was fun.”
“See here, old man,” she warned, but she wasn’t mad since they were onboard.
“Little lady.” It had taken a while to like Mama in her mix-up. But today she was going to buy him a swimsuit, and he liked that fine. That reminded him of the dollar, and frantically he felt for his wallet. For a crazed moment, he thought someone stole it, but it just slipped down between his pants and the side of the chair. He had written FONG on the dollar. You weren’t supposed to write on money, Aggath said. She was like him, like Mama, mixed up, and when he told her he wasn’t going to be anywhere without a dollar, she understood. Sometimes he had more than one dollar, but only one said FONG, and that was the one he wasn’t going to spend until the next bad time.
It was very important to have a dollar. He hadn’t known how important once, and Avan hadn’t told him. Avan should have given him a dollar, so the bad time wouldn’t have happened. The next time he saw Avan, he was going to run his foot over with his wheelchair. He would make Avan cry.
“I need the map, Fong,” Mama said. “Watch for the token man.”
The first three rows of seats were taken, the backs of brown suits, hats, hair hanging over. Passengers hung on straps in the aisle between those rows even though the rail wasn’t moving yet. A woman let go of her strap to fix a baby blanket, and when she reached back to the strap, someone else had taken it. She cursed. Fong wasn’t supposed to say that word, so he hummed as the man stared back at the woman with the baby, and then the woman grabbed a pole. When the baby fussed, throwing its hand out at her face, she ignored it.
He craned his neck to look behind him. There was Mama, moving her finger over the map. Next to her was a man looking at the map out of the corner of his eye. Big girls giggled. They stopped when they saw he was staring, so he moved over them. People didn’t like him staring. The crowd swished one way and then the other, clinking, and then a man in a blue jacket stopped at Fong’s wheelchair. He held out a silver box with a slit in the top. “Token!”
“Mama’s got it,” Fong said. The girls burst into laughter. Fong could tell who was mixed up and who wasn’t. The man next to Mama was mixed up, because he looked away. Aggath was mixed up, and often she looked at the tattoos like sleeves down her arms when she was cleaning Fong’s apartment and just said, “Oh my!” She was surprised, because she forgot that she was mixed up.
The car lurched and Mama grabbed the arm of Fong’s wheelchair. “Put the brake on!” she exclaimed, and he reached down to the catch on the left wheel while she snapped the right. Then there was a grinding that shook his teeth out of his skull, so he pushed them back in and they were flying.
The dark of the tunnel burst into sunlight. The rail climbed up and up and then dropped his stomach to his toes. He squealed at the window, a flash of gray and blue, the sky, the arch of buildings toward the sun. Then a person shifted in front of the window, and the rail curved, dropped, lurched forward. In only minutes, a voice from an intercom box snapped crisply, “Damascus Center!”
The brakes uncurled such a noise that his hearing aid bellowed with static. Mama released his brakes and they swept out onto a platform high above the ground. Most people were going to an escalator, but Mama swung him over to an elevator. He hadn’t wanted the wheelchair. It got in the way of everything. They had to take it, because he got tired so fast, and it wasn’t like she could carry him anymore. He was too big. Avan could have carried him, but Avan was a big boy.
The elevator took them down to a sparkling circular sidewalk, flecks of silver and blue pressed into the white concrete. There was a covered fountain in the middle, three tiers like a cake with a veil so no one could touch the water. Mama wheeled him past to a walk going off the circle.
“I woke up just about here,” she said, and waited. She did that. Mama fought with the social workers, saying that he was bonded to her and she wanted his foster check like before, even if she was mixed-up. She was still his mama. The social workers talked about fraud and monitoring her to make sure that she spent time with Fong. They asked Fong who his Mama was and he said Mama, and who he would go to if he were hurt. He would go to Avan, like he always had. He would go to Aggath, like he did now. Mama laughed tightly. Since then, Mama asked questions like she never had before, and then told his answers to the social workers to prove they were bonded. But Fong wouldn’t tell anybody but Aggath. He hadn’t woken up in a nice place by a fountain. Mama said, “Don’t sulk. We’re here.” They passed under an archway into a store.
“Welcome, shoppers!” greeted a floor screen with a burst of fireworks. People pushed by.
“Daddy! Daddy! Let’s go there!”
“Where are you and Grandpa going, little girl?”
He had to get up, had to see. Mama shook her head but he was out of his chair, unsteady for a moment, and then racing away. Vid screens smart on the shelves, cases of twinkling jewelry, a glory of toys, then he giggled nervously through women’s underwear and saw BOYS. “Fong, wait!”
Shirts, shorts, wrinkled packs of socks. Then his heart stopped at the flood of Teeder TeeRex floaties, Abbey Apatosaur caps, and nasty Sucky Suchomimus and Kodar Corythosaurus with his stupid helmet teamed up and glaring from towels. And there was Maktyl Pterodactyl and his super fleet flying squad, circling swim trunks! He grabbed a pair and waved them at Mama, coming up the aisle with his wheelchair. “Maktyl! They have Maktyl!”
“Fong, these aren’t your size.”
“They have more! Check!” He took her to the rack and she flipped down waistbands.
“No, honey. Your size is over here.” She took him to another part of the store, no plastic spill of water crashing down to a sandy box piled with buckets and shovels. He sniffled as she pressed plain shorts to the front of his pants. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Look, there’s green,” she said. “Remember? Primordial ooze!” And then he cried, because the trunks were a flat, moldy green, not the bright soup of life. He cried and reached out for her, but she was so much smaller now and he just rested on the top of her head while she patted his back. “Fongie, people are looking. Calm down.”
He didn’t know what to do. It was like the other time, when he’d woken up in the bed with tubes up his nose and in his arms and in a place where it really hurt to pull it out. He’d been shouting for something like forever and Zoo wasn’t coming to help. Where was Zoo? She’d been right behind him. And he was so thirsty! There was a water bottle by the bed and he drank it all in this strange bed with bars. The room had no toys and his clothes rustled because they were paper and didn’t close in back. He staggered out into the hall and he was on stilts, he was stretched too high, he held onto a railing to make his legs work. Outside, people were running and screaming all around, and buildings were glowing orange on the inside. He shouted for Zoo, for Avan or Mama, twice for Thecha before he remembered the man had killed her, once even for Becky.
“What the hell? What the hell?” a man screamed. Fong went into the road because the cars were stopped, doors open, crumpled hoods. Avan told him to go in crosswalks, always hold someone’s hand, but Fong didn’t know whose hand to hold. Everyone was a stranger tearing off their clothes like they had poison itch spray. The bad people should have said sorry for what they had done, making people mixed-up. Aggath told him that they were in jail.
Jail meant dungeon, so the bad people hung on chains from their wrists. The only light came from a window high up, and outside there was a dragon! That was what happened to people who made your body mixed-up. It was against the law, and the bad people were in big trouble. Their name was Nasanche. Mama said, “Are you better?”
He pulled away and refused to look at the green trunks. “I don’t like them.”
“You still need a kickboard. Okay? I saw kickboards with dinosaurae.”
A kickboard! He ran like the wind, gasping. A woman was in the aisle with a boy and baby. The baby cried and Fong thought of Sadie, of Avan saying, “We’re family, me and you, Zoo and Sadie.” He’d left out Mama and Thecha and Becky, although it was fine if he left Becky out. Avan called Mama Jean and a foster mother, but Fong called her Mama.
“You need a kickboard, too?” Fong asked shyly. The boy sidled up behind his mother, and she glared. Fong submerged himself, flinging Sucky and Kodar behind him, looking for Maktyl.
A long time ago, there were dinosaurae. They ruled Earth, doing whatever they pleased until they had a bad time of their own, and then a little boy dug up their bones and zow! They came to life! But Fong never found dinosaurae when he dug through the rock garden, and Zoo said that he wouldn’t, not here. She yawned, “File: Earth: Animal: Dinosaur: Extinct. Link. File: 3 Vocabulary: Nasa never had dinosaurs, Fong.” Zoo talked silly when she was tired, file this file that. She was always tired.
Whenever dinosaurae got hurt, they dipped into the pool of primordial ooze to heal them. Fong and Mama and Aggath, they needed primordial ooze. Momma paid for the trunks and kickboard. On the rail, they got the red car. The gray-on-blue, blue-on-gray out the window made his eyes heavy. When he woke up, Mama was arguing at a table. “It says right here, five to seven.”
“Yes,” said a bearded man. They were in an entryway with boys and girls holding towels.
“The pool!” Fong shouted.
“He’s between the ages of five and seven,” Mama insisted.
“I’m SIX!” Two boys were going through a door to the right, already in swim trunks. He snapped the shopping bag off the prong of his wheelchair. “Mama, we got to go!”
“Fong!” she exclaimed, but he had to go now! He slipped through the door before it shut and there was a room with lockers and benches. Boys were everywhere, snapping towels, laughing. He ripped at his clothes and put on his new trunks. Then he let the bag fall away and there it was, Maktyl Pterodactyl flying straight into his face from the kickboard!
“Wow,” he whispered, and there was a very full feeling in his stomach. Then he followed boys out another door to the pool. It had high dives and a slide and way behind it was the beach full of sand and castles and children. Mama grabbed his hand. The wheelchair rolled away from her.
“Don’t leave me like that! I’ll get in trouble if I lose you!”
“Mama? Which is my class?”
“Do you hear me?” People were looking, so Mama smiled politely and said, “This way.”
He was a Spritzer. The swim teacher had a roll sheet, and Fong said, “Here!” at his name.
“Hey, wait a minute!” said a big man in the bleachers.
“Hoffstrum, Lugar!”
“I’m here,” said a woman with big breasts in a purple swimsuit. Fong didn’t laugh like the other children, because Lugar was mixed up. He could see the man inside the woman, and that made him a man, and he was in this class so he was a boy like Fong.
“Lugar’s a boy’s name!” jeered a boy who was not mixed-up. The man named Lugar looked down at his bare feet.
“Come on!” shouted the man in the bleachers. “I don’t want these freaks around my kid.”
Another man stepped behind Lugar and put his hands on his shoulders. “This is my son.”
The teacher rocked back and forth on his feet. “I don’t know about . . . I’ll have to talk to-”
“He is five years old and ready for class,” said Lugar’s father. The teacher began to nod.
The mean man got off the bleachers. “I don’t care who you say is in there, this is a swim class for kids!” He came up to Fong and shouted, “Get out of here!”
Mama said, “I was told to bring him here, and he just turned six!”
The man was calling to other people, and Fong knew they weren’t going to let him be in the class, him or the boy Lugar. So he turned to the pool, held Maktyl out in front, and jumped. For a moment he was weightless, suspended, and he looked down at the water and thought of the pool, him and Maktyl going into the pool, and he wanted to tell Mama it was okay. The pool would make him better, would put things back.
It worked! The boy said, rising from the green. It was Fong’s favorite episode, when Trent the boy got stampeded because Kodar and Sucky told a lie, and Maktyl carried the boy to the primordial ooze to be healed. Trent slumped into it, his hand trailing along the surface before dipping under with a sizzle, like oil skipping in a hot pan. Abbey cried and worried. But Maktyl didn’t worry, and when the boy lifted into the air, he looked to his body with wonder and Maktyl said, you just have to believe.
Fong believed. The water rushed up to cover him.
Far to the west, the jeekes guffawed to the sky, jagged teeth jutting into a cavernous collapsing. Once they had been an unbroken sweep, a thick line of red pencil drawn end-to-end against a ruler’s precision. The sunset jeekes, miles of pitted cliff, mountains without peaks, a grass-rope webbing flat against the crags, connecting pit to hole to home. Ridiculous when people lived there, beetling over the ropes, the teegra, ridiculous in its ruin, an empty black pitch drinking down the sky.
Nasanche learned quickly upon arrival to burn their dead, as cadavers unburied themselves. It was a nightmare of corpses clawing, crawling, firing glassy-eyed and stiff-limbed from their graves, refusing to be Earthly remains. They tired of grandmothers shooting back inside for one last chide, mothers screeched at babies wanting a cold suck at a weeping teat. So they buried them in tall plumes, and Nasa’s subterranean bacteria had nothing to burst from the ground.
The jeekes spilled their glowing people into the camp after the Dammerung, and that was where Shelayla found the wise woman after one of their dead was set to pyre. Their camp was many miles of wild land between fences, but the huts were near the front gate. The Nasanche wise woman was so old her irises had turned white, leaving gray pupils to swim unprotected. Disgusting. Hypnotic. Her white hair swept the ground when she limped toward the hut in the center, and her skirt was alive with color from yursui tree scales sewn into the fabric. Within the tent, she busied herself at a table mixing ingredients. On each shoulder, a bouquet of pink cancerous blossoms threatened to drop petals to her hands in the water, insect crush bobbing on its surface.
Shelayla had brought money to pay for the cure, as well as a case of medications watered down to tarty disinfectants. Sterus would be beside himself if he knew, but as he’d spent the last five years beside himself, it was time he registered this shadow as a corporeal twin. An outraged line grooved itself indelibly in the last five years, running from the left side of his nose up into the first worried stripe on his forehead. It was unofficially recognized as the wrinkle she had put there.
The flip side of the coin was the Dammerung, officially unrecognized last week by the Bureau at the Capitol. It gave Kristabella more ammunition. “See? I told everyone you’re lying!” she said in her insect whine. Oh, did Shelayla detest Kristabella! Zake, she hated Zake, she hated Zake, stuck out his tongue, brave because Kristabella was slouched on the sofa. In light-hearted calculation at dinner, Kristabella said, “Hear the news today, Dad? The Bureau-Elect said the Dammerung never happened after all! Just delusional people trying to defraud the government for welfare checks-” Hand flying to mouth, she looked at Shelayla in horror.
Thankfully, Grant was late at practice that day. Prompt as a bill, Sterus reregistered her for therapy, and she was dodging the same old questions. Name, Shelayla Hauser, 2, age 46. Husband Sterus Hauser, stepchildren Grant and Kristabella. Bioson Zake. Ages 17, 15, 4. This time, though, she knew the answers. Crossing his legs, the entry therapist said, “What are your hobbies?”
“Cooking. I love cooking. I can make a mean boar chili.”
“Who are your friends?”
“I did have a friend, Cloatha, but we’ve drifted apart. It’s sad.”
“Why is it sad?”
She pretended to ponder. “Maybe I should send her a note. It’s important to have friends.”
He sighed, as bored with her as she was with him. “What did you dream last night?”
“Actually, I had a horrible dream.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Zake ran away.”
“I see you’ve had some negative feelings towards Zake. Said he didn’t feel like your child.”
He’s not. “In the dream, I couldn’t find him. I was shaking when I woke up.”
He said pleasantly, “Are you still seeing Becky?” She looked at him sharply, realizing she had misjudged. He noted the look as well.
She loved the therapy game. In an asylum right after the Dammerung, she’d amused herself in group art by sketching the patients drawing pictures of smiley-faces on their easels, instead of recapturing their dark whorlings, disjointed bodies, apartment buildings with a single spill of light in a corner window. She enjoyed circle time waiting her turn through laments of lost years, missing families, and transformed bodies to share how she’d won the slot machine of the Dammerung. They looked at her incredulously while she chattered about getting on with a new life and a fresh start. Then she would console to make them feel inferior that they could not achieve this.
After months of expansive dancing around the jerky shuffling in movement therapy, Sterus found her in the asylum and turned down the recommendation of private, individual counsel. He took her home. After a week of the kitchen and Kristabella and the bedroom, of learning the podginess in her belly was not asylum food but the liquid stuffing around Zake, she’d been taken back as a day-in.
Before the Dammerung, she’d been an overnight patient on occasion, but at a different asylum, one for children. When she needed a permanent rest from her father, or didn’t care for the fosterage, she would make sure fire engulfed something important, like a wallet or a vid com or a pet, and as sure as chech ore under the sunrise jeekes, she’d be back cataloguing new urine stains on a squishy, well-trafficked mattress. It had worked until Jean, who locked everything important in her room behind a lock that Becky couldn’t crack, and didn’t care about what she did to Thecha.
Six months after the Dammerung, Zake shredded her, gutted her, split her open like a watermelon. She’d torn, Sterus cried, and an overripe purple squash took a fist of her spilled intestines and yanked, tearing away something inside her when the midwife lifted him away. She’d been getting back at him ever since. Sterus shelled out for a wealth of therapies, bonding, family, rebirthing, music, attachment, breathing, dream, exertion, holding, trust, grief, relationship, hug, aversive, subversive, play, conflict resolution, desensitization, anything to help her fall in love with their son, and by extension, himself and his family. She wrote poems and played the piano and kept a journal and drew pictures, she wore a wrist-zap for negative thoughts, she peeled at residue left from electrodes, she told stories about blobs and had sessions sitting up, laying down, hanging from her feet in circulation therapy. She took tests and tongued pills of all types and moved dye through her system for brain scans. There wasn’t a therapy she attended that she could not find something redeeming about, even individual couples sex therapy, just her and Sterus with some pervert of a counselor in khakis.
All the while she had to be careful, to not seem as if she were enjoying the attention. She could not let on that it gave her pleasure to not feed Zake, to tell the midwife bottle, please, after many dewy-eyed appointments before the birth extolling her plumping breasts. To let the autonanny take care of him and let the milk trickle to waste down her stomach as she ordered fripperies on Sterus’s credit, perfumes and cosmetics and hats, things Kristabella would want, would happily wear without question when post arrived, and eventually be blamed for ordering. To moan over Sterus’s pistoning shoulder and wink at the counselor, mouthing her name in an ecstatic rictus.
“I worry,” she said to the entry therapist, “that people might think I’m not a nice person.”
“Really? Why is that?”
“I get angry.”
“What do you get angry about?”
“About people . . . needing things.”
“What sorts of things?”
“Kristabella makes fun of my cooking. Sterus wants the house perfect but won’t pay for maid ‘bots. Zake just needs everything. It’s like he’s clawing at me.”
“And what about Grant?”
Damn. He kept throwing curves. “What about him?”
“Why don’t you mention Grant? Doesn’t he need something from you?”
“I wouldn’t call him needy.”
“What do you need from them?”
She considered this. “Peace.”
“What is peace to you?” Answering with a shrug, she looked pensive until he said, “What was peace before the Dammerung?”
Who was this man? What the Dammerung had done was discussed in the asylum immediately after the event, but within two years, it vanished. Bring it up and a therapist changed the subject; she brought it up on purpose to see how many alternate subjects a therapist could find. Most returned the conversation to the present, to the future, never mind that past. What was important was where they were going, not where they had been. One guy in a group wept I was a woman made into a young man, and I don’t know how to control these erections! He was removed to speak privately, and when he returned, he had been given vid sites on male puberty and no more of it was said.
A chime of flute and birds twinkled above them. “What is it today? Pills, class?” He rifled through his clipboard, through the chits of possibility. “I can’t take Nutronica, it gives me terrible gas.”
“I don’t care about your terrible gas,” he said pleasantly. “Sit down, Mrs. Hauser.”
“Not massage, please, I don’t really like strangers touching me.” She loved massage.
“I’m giving you a name, Becky.”
Blood froze in her veins deliciously at this unexpected taboo. “You aren’t supposed to call me that, Doctor. My name is Shelayla Hauser, but you can call me Layla, age 46-”
“Your name is Rebecca Scree, nicknamed Becky: ten and in a Blacksprings foster care at the time of the Dammerung; a budding psychopath with an extensive history of psychiatric treatment. You have found your first body, and I’m giving you a name of a Nasanche wise woman who is rumored to sell a cure. Then we’ll see what happens.”
The theft of a password told her all she needed to know about the therapist, Fredrick Shickes, and his son/daughter in med/psych. He was no entry therapist but the head of the department, and he’d flagged her file for assignment to him. Unwilling to risk his reputation by going to the Nasanche for a cure to their poison, he would risk hers. The bottle from the wise woman went into her closet, and the next time she saw Becky at Kristabella’s school, she regarded her in a new light.
She thought of how pest control against the floppers led to the Nasanche’s gassing of the Wavers, which turned to the destruction of the jeekes. A tweak of one strand could unravel a garment. A drop of food dye could stain an ocean. Something that shouldn’t have mattered shook Nasa so hard that even Earth should have felt the vibrations. The oscillations of the Dammerung only increased in the amplitude of time, the pendulum sweeping so wildly that no true measure of the shaking could ever be fully recorded. Nasa had almost fallen in its quake.
But it would end. A note trembled to a close. A tree narrowed to a trunk.
“Please let me go,” the girl in her body begged. She had been preparing for five years for this moment. For this grace note to end, for her real life to begin again.
“I’m going to let us both go,” Shelayla told the girl bound to the board. “Trust me.”
A minor celebrity had once come out of Rohnert Park, California, and described it to an interviewer with a flip of sophisticated hair, a roll of tinted eyes, and the word shithole. Though timeless, the escape cry of the young and mobile, the city council publicly deplored the image she tarred them with, and feathered her name from a large-font public interest pamphlet before the ink had a chance to dry.
Privately, the council did not disagree. It wasn’t so much that the charge was inaccurate. It was simply unfair. Rohnert Park was no worse than any other chain-linked suburban drowning in the states in 2025. No, it didn’t have 19th century shop fronts, or a gushing wine industry, and it had never supplied background scenery for an Oscar-winning film. It didn’t have a bootstrap history to instill local pride, or a quaint tradition to reenact, or a public forum in which to display either of the former. But the city did put up lights for the holidays on the trees of the main strip.
The idea was floated that the city’s public statement should include not putting weight into the inarticulate opinion of a cocaine-addicted, D-list actress, but as that implicated their own schools, both educationally and somewhat criminally, the suggestion was only enjoyed in closed session. Rohnert Park wasn’t a shithole. It just wasn’t anywhere worth a postcard home, but if the spoiled, drug-addled bitch thought growing up in Rohnert Park was some dirt-scratching, third-world background to overcome, she should have tried Biloxi 4, the country of Chad, or what was left of Florida.