The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  Rosa knows all of this, but it doesn't stop the stubborn five-year-old part of her from wanting to try. Feeling a little ridiculous, she sidles over to a corner, extends the tip of her tongue, and gives the wallpaper a tentative swipe. She braces for the bitterness of boiled glue, the chemical tang of several generations of mothballs and kerosene smoke. She prepares for life's bad taste in her mouth, inevitable as wrinkles or scorpions in the kitchen.

  It tastes like figs crossed with raspberries, sweet and sappy and juicy-tart all at the same time.

  The voice comes from the empty room behind her, a dry, honeycomb-and-bone thing like sugar skulls trying to speak. “See there? Life ain't so bad sometimes — leastways not all the time. Don't let him make you forget that, else he's already won and we might as well just pack it up and go home.”

  Rosa whirls with her hand already fluttering for her gun. She breathes a sigh of relief that's half curse, half greeting when she realizes it's just Gray Sister, seated primly on the sofa.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” she says. That the fox can talk now doesn't surprise her in the slightest; this is, after all, only a dream. “And where'd you get that horrible accent?”

  “Where'd you get your dark skin? Where'd you come by the color of your hair?” Gray Sister scoffs down her muzzle, all toothy disdain and bristling fur. “Don't ask stupid questions, darlin'. I know you got more brains sloshing around in your head than that. Now, where did I come from, that's a pretty good one. I could tell you,”  — and here the sneer slips into a rueful, foxy grin, like a bullet sliding into a chamber —  “but I don't particularly feel like talking about that right now. Let's hunker down and have a pow-wow about you. About the future, if you get me.”

  Now it's Rosa's turn to bridle. She eyes the vixen suspiciously. “What about the future?” she asks. “What about me?”

  “I swear, there's more of an echo in here than inside Cap'n Todd's empty puddin' head. Untwist your tail and stop puffing up, I'm not here to give you grief. We're all behind you one hundred and ten percent, more than you probably cotton. Hell, if I die a second time on this little hunt I'll consider it time well spent and rest easier in my grave, wherever that may end up being. Not like I was getting any sleep before.” She shakes her wedge-head irritatedly, like she's dislodging a fly from her eartip. “Didn't I say I wasn't gonna go into all of that? Lord a-mercy. Anyway, what I came here to tell you is this, and you remember it like it's written across the face of your fiddle. Once the hunt's done and the skin's tacked up to dry, move on with your life. Don't let that carpetbagging piece of rat-bone fool you into believing livin' ain't worth it, ‘cause it is. Even with scalawags like him runnin' through it it is, I tell you that true.”

  “But — ”

  “Butts are for rifles and cigarillos, little sister. Love something. Doesn't have to be another person. Could just be your own sweet self. But for goodness sakes, don't let him take off with your joy between his teeth, else you might as well have died with all the rest of us in that crawlspace beneath the stairs.” The fox snaps her fangs together, snickety-snak. Rosa shudders at the noise, and the memory. “That's all I came here to say, anyways. Some of the others are better at speeching, but I got elected to it. Hope they're happy with the results.”

  And the mystery of the vixens suddenly clicks together like the oiled machinery of a revolver inside Rosa's head.

  It all happened like the worst kind of fairy tale. Rosa can almost imagine some prairie hen of a mother telling it to her circle of wide-eyed daughters, a cautionary sermon on impropriety and the dangers that lie waiting around every corner for headstrong young girls:

  Rosa's sixteen and oh! my darlings, such beauty you've never seen. Curls thick as blacksnakes, eyes brown as a summer flood, and a dab hand at the fiddle that could charm a Mennonite into doing the Jarabe Tapatío. She's the delight of her father's eye and the worry of her mother's heart, high-spirited, fractious, and stubborn as three mules standing end to end to end.

  A rich man lives in this town. He wears a bright blue uniform with bright brass buttons, and his hair is bright, too, like a penny at the bottom of a spring. There's money jingling in his pockets, a whistle like rubies on his lips, and a glint in his eye when he looks at Rosa that says he'll have her on his knee before the next Fourth of July. And does Rosa mind, my dears? Does she turn up her nose at all his flattering and charming and carrying on, like she's done with all the other farm boys who came a-courting? Good heavens, no! For this captain is an easterner, and that spells different, and different spells interesting. She follows him around like a cat expecting fish, and if his eyes are sly (so sly!) and his expression foxy-sharp (so sharp!) she pays no attention and gives it no thought. Love's wicked sneaky that way, my darlings. Like blinders on the eyes, or having no eyes at all.

  So here he is and here she is and never have you seen a better-matched pair, tight as ticks in a coyote's armpit. They're the talk of the town and the toast of the throng, admired by every second son and firstborn daughter in the county. The months march on, and, as often happens, talk of a wedding springs up. Rosa's chomping at the bit to see where she'll live — to see where they'll live, he and she and their lives ivy-twined together but her Captain, sly and slick as a greased lizard, never takes her there. It's away down the white road, he says, far too dusty a length to travel for a mere visit.

  “How many rooms are there in your villa?” she asks. For our Rosa's a curious girl, as curious as a cat with its paw under the door.

  “As many as there are teeth in a fox's jawbone,” says he. “You could dance on your pretty toes from one end to the other and back again, fiddling all the while, and never come across the same set of doors twice.”

  “When can I see it?” she asks. For our Rosa's an impatient girl, as impatient as first love and last rites.

  “Why, when we're married, of course,” says he. “You know as well as I do what people would say if you visited before then, don't you?”

  Rosa smiles too, but she's not smiling inside, no no no. Propriety be damned, her heart says. I want what I want and I want it now.

  All through the long weekdays of sewing and study she's imagining her lover's touch, until she's near full to bursting with impatience. All through Sunday mass and Monday oration and Tuesday baking and Wednesday washing she's thinking of his eyes, and lips, and hands, until she can barely focus on another blessed thing. The moon comes up one Thursday night big and round as a horsecrippler cactus, and Rosa's had enough of prim and enough of proper. Out of bed she goes, dancing past creaky boards and sleeping siblings and the room where her parents lay a-snoring. Into the stables and out again like thread looping a needle, and now she's pounding away down the white road and no one can stop her.

  The wind blows fine white sand all over them and now they really are a ghost army, gritty and swift as dust devils as the sign gets fresher and the foothills loom. The vixens smell victory and begin to lope. Rosa senses it too and kicks Santiago into an out-and-out run, reins in one hand, the polished grip of her brother's revolver warm in the other. She imagines the other girls riding beside her, bloody and vengeful. She whispers their names, lets them spring from her mouth like hunting animals.

  Samantha.

  Lettie.

  The pretty Navajo girl with the long, long hair.

  The one with the freckles nearest the door.

  Essie from Buck's Ridge, who died a free woman.

  Ada, who died with her hands over her eyes.

  There's a crack, like the purple evening sky is hatching from some unfeasibly huge crow's egg, and a little gout of sand spins upward to her right. She barely has time to register what's going on — a gunshot a rifle someone's shooting at us he is shooting at us — before the next bullet whines past her ear, so close the wind of it tugs at her hair. Rosa blesses the dusk, the shadows, and Lady Luck. She stands in her stirrups and screams a challenge across the plain, her voice a snarl of barbwire and
rust.

  “Is that the best you can do?” she howls. “Do you think I'm afraid of you, you miserable stinking lump of horse shit?” The tears are finally falling now, hot and angry. “We found you! Get out here and fight me face-to-face, coward! Either shoot straight or show your god-damned face!”

  The silence unreels and stretches lariat-taut, Santiago's hoofbeats drumming a tattoo across its surface. For long seconds no response comes. Rosa hunches closer to the horse's neck, pressing her cheek against warm skin and lathered hair. She wants him to do it. She dares him to call her bluff, to finish what he started, to take her maidenhead with a bullet. Anger like ether fills her up and chases out what little fear is left, leaving her as hollow and light as gnawed rabbit bone. Let the lead fly. Let her skin rip like a rattlesnake's shedding. There's nothing inside to tear apart but air and a paper heart.

  “Go on,” she whispers. “Do it. Do it and be damned.”

  It comes like a knock at the door after a long illness. Gray Sister shrieks, tumbles into a clump of sage, and fades to smoke and twilight, still clinging desperately to her old shape.

  Rosa feels the vixen go, a deep-down-in-her-bones tug that hurts worse than an entire pouch of bullets. She tries to scream, but it comes out a wordless gurgling whimper and the wind snatches it away as greedily as it did Gray Sister. Shots are peppering the earth like hail now, as fast as her unseen enemy can pull the trigger. Pirate falls by the wayside, biting at her fading flank. Sepia somersaults like a great unseen hand has grabbed hold of her scruff, already mist before she can hit the ground. Phantom and Frizzle and Patch die in rapid succession and buzzards with straight-razor beaks tussle at Rosa's guts, each casualty another pull and twist. He's severing parts of her she didn't even know she possessed. Invisible connections are snapping, ragged as exposed nerve.

  Captain Todd is sending her a gunpowder telegraph. I know how much this hurts, it says. There are worse things than dying, and I'm going to teach you all about them before I finally take your life.

  Somehow she manages to stay a-saddle, clutching blindly at Santiago's mane as they charge across the last of the desert and up the first foothill. The world recedes into a raw red haze of pain and noise. When she comes back to, there are only eight of the original twenty-four vixens left, a snarling half-ring beneath the pile of cliffside boulders where Captain Todd has gone to ground.

  He's scrawnier than she remembers, all gangly, boyish limbs and pale skin shrunken over bone. The pretty blue uniform he always took such pride in hangs off his shoulders in scarecrow tatters, toes peeking through ripped scraps of boot. Even his face is strange now, covered from chin to cheek in a forest of gingery hair. The Todd she knew kept his mustache trimmed and his boots glossed to a high sheen. This stinking, hairy creature clicking his empty revolvers at her foxes can't be the same man, and yet she knows it has to be. There hangs the evidence from his belt, shriveled and grisly. There sits the memory in her mind's eye, vivid as a vision of Hell.

  “Rosa. The one that got away. I declare, this is a spot to bump into a soul, isn't it?” He doffs his hat to her, polite to the bitter end. “I believe the last time we crossed paths I promised to kill you.”

  Her voice is tight when she manages to reply, more controlled than she thought possible under the circumstances. “You've gotten pretty good at lying. Looks like that's not gonna stop any time soon.” The hammer punctuates her words with a sharp click. “I loved you once, you know. Maybe I still do. Doesn't mean I don't think you're a monster that needs to be put out of his misery, though. I'm sure those other girls loved you too, right up until you slit their throats.”

  “Sanctimonious, aren't we? Haven't you ever heard that the memory of a thing is better to keep than the thing itself?”

  “No, but I'm more than willing to find out if it's true.”

  He barks a laugh. “You and what's left of your pack of ghost bitches, I presume? Whatever you paid your scrub witch was too much. All it takes is silver bullets and a little bit of aim to break that sort of sorce — ”

  The bullet catches him in the kneecap. His chuckle turns to a shriek, the sound tearing at Rosa like a swallowed fishhook. Down the slope he goes, cracking against boulders and slabs of stone, his momentum carrying him right into the jaws of the waiting vixens. They waste no time falling on him with their sharp, sharp teeth.

  If I was brave and strong and honest, I'd have done that myself, she thinks as she turns her horse away. The noises from behind are horrific. But I'm not. God help me, I'm not.

  When they're finished, all that's left of him is a scrap of blue cotton and a fox's whisker.

  Rosa doesn't go home. The only thing that makes that village full of cowards “home” now is her family, and she cannot bring herself to face them after everything that's happened. Not yet.

  It's not a bad way of living. Odd jobs and jackrabbits keep her clothed and fed, and the remaining vixens — for better or worse, no more come up after that night — provide company and much-needed cheer. Some mornings the sky is so blue she could drown in it, the wind smelling of sage and clean earth. These are the good days, the forgetting days, when she races Santiago against cloud shadows and clutches Gray Sister's advice between her teeth like a stolen hen. Just as frequent are the bad turns, the nights when she dreams of the dead and wakes with the sound of Captain Todd's final muffled screams still echoing in her ears.

  She misses her brothers, blunt and teasing. She misses Gray Sister, curled like a tombstone at the edge of her bedroll. She misses having an unscarred heart. The way back to her old life is still somewhere out there, Rosa knows it must be, but no matter how many times she casts for the scent, she can never seem to find it.

  Tornado's Siren

  Rhea is nine years old when she first meets the tornado that will fall in love with her. It comes late in the afternoon, after school and graham crackers and the four o'clock showing of Jeopardy. The sidewalks sweat like her father after a jog and the sky scums over with bruised purple-black clouds. The muggy wind blows restless, so unsettled she gets nervous even before the television starts blaring warnings. She reads the names of the counties as they scroll across the bottom of the screen, listening intently to everything the weatherman says. Rhea doesn't know what a lot of the words mean, but she knows what fear sounds like, and his voice is chock full of it.

  “Folks, we have a very serious situation here. If you are in the path of this storm, I need you to go to an interior hall or bathroom right now.” A wind hits the antenna outside and he briefly fades to ghostly static before popping back in. “We've got a debris ball on radar and confirmed sightings of a touchdown in Lark County. This is big. If you're in a mobile home, find a low-lying area outside, like a ditch or culvert. If you're listening to this from a car radio — ”

  The electricity cuts him off mid-sentence. Rhea is left alone in the dark of her grandparents’ house, surrounded by shadows and the noise of increasing rain.

  She wanders to the carport to watch the lowering sky, wondering where her grandma and grandpa could be. They are always here when her parents drop her off after school, and they always know what to do in big, frightening situations. Through mixup or accident they are not here this afternoon, out running errands or visiting friends or who knows what, and that leaves all the scary decisions in Rhea's hands, something she's not at all comfortable with. Her stomach writhes like a pool of scared tadpoles. The first camera flash of lightning drives her back into the house, away from the sticky breeze into musty, waiting silence. The battery-operated kit-kat clock on the kitchen wall stupidly ticks away the minutes, grinningly oblivious to their situation.

  “You'll get blown away too,” she tells it. “Right into the next county.”

  The kit-kat clock swishes on. She thinks she can sense nervousness in its shifty eyes.

  Left with no other choice, Rhea sets out to prepare by herself in all the ways she's been taught. She strips the blankets and pillows off the bed and piles
them into the bathtub. She grabs a flashlight and hauls Murray the big yellow tabby into the bathroom with her, all ten pounds of yowling, wounded dignity. When there's nothing else to do, she shuts the door, climbs into the tub, and huddles beneath the comforter. The air is stifling, and Murray won't stop meowing. She tries to say the prayers she's been taught, but they don't stop the aching in her gut like Grandma says they should. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Even at nine she's a little wary about putting all her faith into such a moody higher power, although that's the kind of thought she would never say in front of her grown-ups.

  The waiting is the worst part. Balled up in the blackness, hoping that maybe nothing will happen, listening to the wind increase and rake at the walls. Listening, always listening, unable to do anything but stay put, the air getting more and more stale under the heavy sheet. Rhea holds her breath for as long as she can — it feels like hours — and then comes back up, clawing at the bedding for a fresh breath. She tugs the blanket away just in time to see, through the window, the neighbor's privacy fence go spiraling by, panels of plywood twirling like old newspapers.

  The full force of the storm hits the house a second later. Everything — roof, walls, window, her popping ears — creaks and then gives before the bull's roar of the twister.

  Rhea thinks she screams, but the whole world is screaming too so it's hard to tell. Glass shatters and pops into her face, cutting her cheeks. Bathroom tile and bits of plaster rain down on her head. The room pulls apart in hunks, walls peeled down to pink insulation and rose-printed, rose-scented strips of shredded paper. She realizes the ceiling's gone when hail begins to fall, nasty, biting little chunks of cold ice. Through the wall of noise and debris, looking up and up and up, she can see the jaws of the monster, an endless swirling throat of fog and whipped rain.