The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  Links rattle. Something big rumbles. Smaller shadows school like minnows, giggling and teasing, shying away at every snort or shift only to come flocking back when it looks like the danger's passed. Not that there's really any threat; as her eyes get used to the darkness Regan can see the chains and ropes looped and relooped around Topsy's neck and ankles, big old logging chains meant to pull redwoods crashing to the ground. Pebbles bounce off her leathery hide, and she pays them no more mind than a hawk shrugging off a territorial cock sparrow. Boys poke sticks and lit cigarettes at her from across the ropes; she lifts her trunk out of range and dreams on, spirit touring times and places Regan can't even guess at. Her mind is the most alien thing Regan's ever had truck with outside the God in her mother's Bible.

  Almost there. She watches the scene a little longer, putting off what has to be done. One more trick. Jodie and the rest of them better appreciate this, wherever they are.

  She takes a deep breath, latches onto a guide rope, gets her mind right for what's coming, and bellows like a whipped mule.

  “COPS! COPS! LOOK OUT, COPS ARE COMING!”

  Veins in her throat give up and bust their dams. She can feel them popping before the shock snaps and she goes into freefall, mind and soul and all the things that make Regan Regan rubbed out by a root-shaking, roof-tearing wave of wrongness her brain recognizes from its treetop perch as the worst pain she's ever felt — the kind you know is damaging things the moment it lands. Somewhere shadowy boys are shouting, shoving, scattering. They flutter past her like moths in a dream.

  When she comes back to herself she's on her knees in a puddle of something dark, throat still registering aftershocks. Topsy looks down at her impassively. She wipes her mouth with the back of one palsied hand; it comes back sticky, copper-smelling.

  Hey, Regan signs.

  No reply, just watchful stillness. Well there's a damned surprise. She hauls herself to her feet, hay and dirt sticking to the blood on the palms of her hands.

  I came here to see you, she continues. You and me got business.

  Chains rattle. The air stirs. No, says the slow shadow of Topsy's trunk, black against the canvas. No more business. No business but death.

  That's good, 'cause death is what I maybe came here to offer you. A righteous death. The movement for “righteous” looks a little something like two tusks quickly dipping down and then back up again, a goring, tossing flip. Regan slips a hand into her pocket, palming the bottle's cool cola-bottle smoothness. She sets it down on the ground between them — close enough so Topsy can reach, fettered up as she is — and steps back, head swimming from the act of bending over.

  This, she signs, is a seed. Crush it and death sprouts. Not just yours. The men with the chains. The circus men, the poison-factory men, the ones who will come to see you burn — all of 'em. Like lightning striking. You'll be lightning. You'll burn and you'll strike and then you'll be gone. It's up to you. Dying's a personal thing. It's… just… She trails off, hunting for the right words. Exhaustion is butting in on her thoughts, pushing them to the back of the hall.

  … I just wanted to give you the option, she finishes, at a loss as to how to put it any better. A friend gave it to me. I'm passing it along to a higher power.

  Even with her death waiting and the sounds of a crowd gathering outside, Topsy takes her sweet, thoughtful time responding. You can practically hear the gears groaning inside that great skull of hers, slow but unstoppably steady in their revolution. Righteousness. Regan thinks of the sign again, invisible enemies flung into the air like pinecones. An old word, indiscriminate as a knife's edge, a tusk's tip.

  Like lightning, Topsy signs. For the first time, Regan notices that her trunktip is glowing a faint, familiar green.

  Yup.

  You wish for them to die, too. Not a question. For the poisoning. For killing you.

  Regan shrugs. No argument there.

  Asking nice never seemed to get either of us much, did it? Maybe this'll get somebody's attention.

  Topsy reaches down. Her trunk curls and uncurls, twitching at the tip like an agitated cat's tail. For the briefest blip of a second she hesitates and Regan thinks maybe she won't take the bottle, that she's sadder than she is angry, that her execution will amount to nothing more than a pitiful sentence in a history book swollen tick-tight with so many injustices the poisoning of a factory full of girls and the mean public death of a small god don't even register as particularly noteworthy.

  But that's somebody else's once upon a time. Gently, gingerly — the way any soul would handle their own death — Topsy takes the little vial and tucks it away inside her mouth.

  She thinks of her Many Mothers, fierce and vast, swift-trunked slayers of panther, hyena, and crocodile. She thinks of Furmother-With-The-Cracked-Tusk, tricking a bull and splitting herself so that the stories could be free and the Mothers could be We. Unresisting, she lets them lead her forth in chains. She lets them lead her forth in chains, and when they hoot and roar and clamber she thinks on Furmother, her bravery and her cunning, her careful, plodding patience.

  The final fruit to be plucked is not rage, but song — a learning song, a teaching song, a joining-together song. She rolls it on her tongue, careful not to split it before its time. The men gibber and yap and lean out to touch her as she passes. The man holding the lead chain barks a warning at them in the jackal tongue of humans, hurrying along before her trunk can sweep them clear of the path.

  There is still fear in her heart. To be is to be wary, and so there is still fear in her heart, balking wide-eared at what lies coiled at the end of the walk. Danger! Lions! Claws and teeth and tawny fur! She smells her ending, and her feet plant themselves, bending-parts senselessly locking. The man yells and tugs and strikes her with whip and chain; he too stinks of fear, sharp as crushed nettles underfoot. She struggles with the man and the fear — Guns! Men! Fire and smoke and pits with sharpened sticks! — but if the man can be ignored, the ending-fear cannot. It lies deeper than hurt and deeper than the need to sing her own undoing song, a root buried so far within no tusk can pry it free. The man-herd howls, thrown into musth by her hesitation. They claw and push at her haunches with their trunk-paws, desperate to hurry along, always and forever in a hurry.

  Another human pushes out of the mass — the dead girl, still moving, still somehow on her feet when every part of her stinks of corruption. She exchanges a few guttural yips and yowls with the man on the end of the chain, pain rolling off her like river water. Eventually he huffs and puffs and reluctantly passes her the chain. She turns, asking, in the little language of twisted trunk-paws: Are you well? Can you walk? It's just a little further. We'll go together.

  And even this much We is enough to drive the fear back into the high grass. Her mind stills. Her legs unstiffen. Together they cross the overwater, men flytrailing behind. Together they go to sing the song of their undoing, the joining, teaching, come-together song.

  Sing thunder, O Mothers!

  Sing her song in this dusty place!

  Glowing like green lightning, so many Many Mothers apart,

  Do not forget what lies Beneath,

  And do not forget what came Before,

  Sing Her Story like lightning,

  Like thunder,

  Like the Glorious Mothers Many:

  We, She, Her,

  Us.

  No Flight Without the Shatter

  Pretend you are the land. Pretend you are a place far away, the last vibrant V of green and gold and tessellated rock before the sea and sky slither south unchecked for three thousand lonesome turns of a tern's wing. Once upon a time the waters rose to cut you off from your mother continent, better independence through drowning. Some day soon, when the ice across the ocean turns to hungry waves, all the rest will follow, sliding beneath an oil-slick surface as warm and empty as a mortician's handshake.

  But that does not concern us — yet. You are the land, and today you are
here to bear witness to a story four million years in the telling as she closes her eyes for the final time, striped haunches slowing their rise and fall as entropy hoists another tattered victory flag.

  Thylacinus: from the Greek thýlakos, meaning “pouch” or “sack.” You have made her into your own image, a unique beast neither wolf nor tiger but its own striped singularity. No one at the zoo is qualified to sex such a creature. They dub her Benjamin, short omnivorous ape jaws unequipped to pronounce her true name even if anyone ever thought to ask.

  The cage is very hot. There is no shade. When night falls there will be no shelter against the unseasonable cold. She paces and pants, her shadow writing the future across concrete in angular calligraphy. Beyond and through the chicken wire bland faces peer, unable to make any sense of the warning in her trot, the glassiness in her staring eyes.

  But you are the land, and you read the message loud and clear: a missive from the place between being and not; a signal from the space between the final breath and whatever comes after.

  Auntie Ben pats makeup over her stripes every morning. The last neighbors moved on years before, the only folks left to see are Martha and Doris and Linnea, but Auntie Ben, she has her habits. In the end, the only sense you have to make, she tells Linnea, is to yourself. And so: delicate little dabs along the lean, dusky line of her jaw, up the cheekbones sharp as taxidermy knives, all the way to her forehead, where hair the color of dirty sand dangles listless, fabric on barbed wire. Nobody knows where she found the powder. Nobody asks. Maybe it was waiting when the three arrived, like the vanity and the three beds and the yellow farmhouse itself.

  “Every mammal's got stripes,” she says. “Even you. Fella named Blaschko found 'em. Somewhere back along the line, your people took 'em off as easily as I shuck my own skin, buried them in a cigar box out back. If you could find that box again, you'd find your stripes, sure as fleas and fresh blood.”

  Linnea asks Doris if this is true. Doris is stout and cheerful and most likely of the three aunties to give a true answer. She cooks, she straightens, she drives the pickup to what passes for a town these days to pick up supplies. She does not work on the ship. She lacks the imagination, she says; she was never that great at flying to begin with. The little cedar chest at the foot of her bed more often than not stays closed.

  “There's no telling with Benny,” she says, scratching at her round, flat beak of a nose. “She's always been a reader, that one. You don't look like you got stripes to me, though. Humans come in all shapes and sizes — most of 'em hairy or hungry, terribly hungry, how can such skinny things gobble up so many? — but I never do believe I've seen a striped one. Then again, not a lot of them around to study anymore 'cept you, little chick.”

  She doesn't bother climbing to the roof gables to ask Auntie Martha, staring sadly up at an empty fading sky as bronze-and-violet as her hair. Instead, Linnea wanders back inside and stands alone in front of the vanity mirror, searching for invisible stripes. The light through the bedroom curtains is a washed-out yellow, like paper or preserved hide or the end of a long, hot day.

  They never say how they got together, Linnea's three aunties, or where they hailed from before finding her and feeding her and fetching her home, lucky orphan among grubby roadside hundreds. She doesn't remember faces before theirs. There was a gas station with busted windows. There was a little scratched spot in the dirt beneath the old pumps where she slept at night. There was potato crisp grease, tangled hair, and the occasional sandstorm. Beyond that, Linnea's memory is a skull picked clean; shake it and hear leaves rattle inside.

  That's okay. Now is good. Back Then was probably not-so-good. And as to what lies ahead… No. Linnea keeps that lonesomeness locked down tight as any auntie's chest. Now is good; the rest doesn't matter.

  Endlings make for strange bedfellows, Auntie Ben often says, pounding away at sheets of rusted tin atop the rickety rope ladder. She keeps a red bandana faded to the color of bared gums tied around her forehead. Her overalls are so stitched and crookety-patched (Doris does her best, but her fingers are too thick and strong and her eyesight too bad not to mangle such tiny work) they look like a quilt tossed over her long, lean self. She keeps all her tools in a denim pouch against her belly, saws and nails and a gone ghost forest worth of toothpicks forever tumble-scattering to the dusty ground far below. Auntie Ben has a lot of teeth to keep clean. When there were fresh bones to gnaw, she says, wistful, there was no need for toothpicks.

  “Wombat feet,” she says. “Those always did the best job. Itty-bitty little bones, but sturdy.” A sigh, a shake of the head. Back to soldering a seam, goggles pulled safely down, impossible jaw firmly set.

  Auntie Martha mostly draws star charts, sitting atop the farmhouse with paper and pen. Sometimes she sings. Her voice is croaky and harsh and the words make no sense to Linnea: endless repetitions of the same sound tunelessly unreeled, keeho keeho keeho kee! Sometimes she cocks her head afterward, almost like she's waiting for a response. Nothing ever halloas back. Just the windmill creaking, the screen door slamming, the bang-bang-bang-bang of Auntie Ben's hammer smashing dusk's purple hush to pieces like a carelessly laid egg.

  Pretend you are the sky. Pretend you are a sky the faint peach and dusty slate of a dove's wing, folded protectively over darkening fields of corn and cities where yellow lights wink on like punctilious fireflies. Some day soon you will wither and broil. Those newly-hatched smokestacks on the horizon will slide beneath feather and skin and subclavius muscle with a hypodermic's lethal care, a payload of jaundice injected with a belch and a billow, and the resulting buildup of toxins will ensure nothing bigger than a botfly ever darkens your horizon again. Your decay will smother the world, a dead bird huddling over an empty nest.

  Soon, but not today. Today you are full of life — screech owl and nightjar, cranefly and bat. They know the spaces between stars. Even the ones locked fast in cage and crate can feel the wheel turning, seasons brushing shoulders on the subway. Away I must be going, they say to the bars and the locks, the cold iron that batters the breath from their hollow bones. I've had a lovely life here, but spring waits for no one, and I really must insist —

  Even when all the rest are gone, millions blasted from your breast and returned as smoke, she feels the pull and calls to you. Every autumn for twenty-nine years, right up until the day of her stroke. The zookeepers hang the name of a dead president's wife around her foot like a wartime message, hoping for domesticity, but she is still Ectopistes migratorius, traveler in name and nature.

  She hears the sound of phantom wings and hurls herself against the ceiling, desperate to take her place in the thunder. Her tired old body is the color of a bruise.

  I'm coming, she whirrs, again and again. Wait for me! I know which way to go!

  “Once upon a time,” Auntie Ben says, seated beside Linnea's bed, “there was a cage. But that cage is rusted all to hellfire and back now, and the men who built it are bones in the dust so dry not even a dark-flanked yearling would stop to take a sniff. Nobody remembers a damn thing about those men. Nobody remembers their chickens, their guns, or their stupid cage with the concrete floor. But they remember us, my little naked joey, sharp-toothed pride of my pouch. We were beautiful and strong. Our stripes left long shadows across their minds. There were plenty left to remember us, but who will be left to remember your kind?”

  “Once upon a time,” Auntie Doris says, “ — and oh, it was a long time ago, fresh fruit and green grass and the Rats and the Dogs not yet come — there were nests! Nests on the ground, can you imagine, beneath trees that dropped nuts so close you didn't have to stretch your neck out far to take them. We laid our eggs where we pleased. But then the Men came — yesyes, and the Rats, and the Dogs, the terrible slavering Dogs — and the guns went bark bark bark all the live-long day. Our nests and our eggs and our fine fat selves, we dwindled down to nothing.

  “But do they remember us now, sweet milk of my crop? Bless my
gizzard and claws, they do! Those hungry men stopped being hungry, oh, ages ago, and their guns and their clubs rotted like rained-on feathers. Nobody remembers much at all about them and their growling bellies, but they remember our name, you'd better believe they do. There were plenty left to make our name round and fat, but mercy, who will be left to remember your kind?”

  “Once upon a time,” Auntie Martha says — her voice is so soft you have to bend your eardrums low to pick up the words, a halting thing much gentler than her evening song — “we were a thousand. We were a million. We were many, and we blotted the sky with Ourselves. We flew where we pleased, and where we flew was pleasing. We followed the starmaps, the pull in our heads that said Go here! Go here!

  “But the guns brought us down, by the thousands and the millions and the many. We lost the stars. We lost ourselves. But d'you think, little squab of my breast, that they could ever forget the sound of that many wings blotting out the sun? There were plenty of mouths and memories to pass on the beating of a million wings that was our name. As to who or what will be left to remember your own kind, dwindling with no wings to bear them away…”

  Auntie Martha shakes her head.

  “We were many too, once,” she repeats, barely a whisper. “I really am sorry.”

  Linnea has a voice, too, but she doesn't use it much. The inside of her head is a safe place, full of futures that will never happen so long as she keeps her words under lock and key. You open doors when you say things. There's no telling what will come out of them, or where they may carry you off to in their jaws. Linnea likes it here; she has no desire to be stolen away. The days flash by unmarked — fur-yellow, feather-purple, rust-red — and change comes in slow, sneaky bursts, the space between looking away and turning back, moments of distraction. The earth grows a little more cracked. The ship teeters a little higher into the brassy sky. The wars Elsewhere, according to the dying radio in the kitchen, are running out of bodies.