DENNIS! DENNIS! I left Dennis!
I spluttered a hasty thank you and goodbye to the glaucous-winged gull and splayed my wings for liftoff—destination CenturyLink, where I’d left one half of my murder outside a stadium stuffed with carnivorous MoFos, as well as the animal responsible for the most fatalities in the whole of Africa. Just then, the ones I was waiting for arrived. The dark-eyed junco got there first, landing on a nearby hawthorn branch. It hopped, catching its breath. The glaucous-winged gull assuredly took to the air and gave me a quick glance that, I swear, seemed as if he knew a secret that he was having trouble keeping.
I quickly called out to Aura to get news of my bloodhound partner, explaining exactly where I’d left him. A ruby-crowned kinglet beamed himself down from a higher branch and offered to see to it himself. I agreed somewhat reluctantly, watching him dart and vanish. Why was everyone suddenly being so helpful to the ostracized hybrid crow?
A small eruption of soil burst from the grass as a creature like a tiny Komatsu bulldozer with a penile nose and a hamster butt emerged. It had MoFo-like hands in the thin pink hue of a newly hatched bird. A mole. Or as Big Jim categorized them, “Yard Demolishing Fuck Trolls.” Shortly after, an opossum wobbled into view at the base of the hawthorn, eggshell-white, prehensile tail coiling behind him. I stared at a dark-eyed junco, a plump black-headed bird, waiting for an explanation. The junco was full of sassafras—I could just tell by the way he bounced around, twitchy and convulsive. He made a deliberate smacking tick-tick-tick sound, one I suspected he also used to warn predators away from his nest.
“Are you here to tell me about The One Who Opens Doors?” I asked the junco.
He cocked his head an infuriating number of times. “Yup, yup, yup.”
“And why are they here?” I asked, gesturing to the blinking mole and the pasty-faced opossum.
“Same reason he’s here,” said the opossum, yawning to expose a row of crooked needle-teeth. “The One Searched For sent word about you. You’re the half-and-half bird with a porpoise—”
“Purpose, you common conehead!” cheeped the junco.
The opossum ignored him. “You’re The One Who Keeps. We’re here to answer whatever you need answering. Help wherever we can.”
A swell of pride rose in me. When had anyone ever seen a mole, an opossum, and a junco meet up, apart from in an unsavory joke? I was beginning to think that there was some sort of actual camaraderie between furred and feathered that I had overlooked before. A sort of basic respect, a communal backscratching. The idea excited me.
He added, “Also, some crows told us if we didn’t come, they’d pluck out our eyes.” I chose to ignore the additional intel.
The mole shuffled around the patch of grass, sifting the soil with those pink hands. I wished they were a little larger so they could be of use. “What are you half-and-half of?” he asked, dick-nose waving in the air. The mole was funny with his little MoFo fingers. I had an undeniable urge to put a top hat on him.
“I’m just who I am,” I told him with some urgency. Dennis. “Tell me what you know.”
The mole and the junco started at the same time, interrupting one another. “I’ll go first!” said the junco, head darting.
“No, me!” said the mole, shuffling in place.
“One at a time,” I said, looking up to the sky for signs of the ruby-crowned kinglet. “Opossum, you go first.” The dark-eyed junco muttered rapid-fire expletives. I’d already picked my favorite of the three. I’m not sure why everyone hates opossums so much; they may look like someone shaved the buttocks of a poodle and taught it to talk through its asshole, but they are generally pretty likable critters.
“HSSSSSSSSS,” came the hideous warning the opossum spat at the junco. It was pretty unlikable. “Okay, Half-And-Half Bird, I’ll tell you what my cousin told me. He saw The One Who Opens Doors, alright. You see, my cousin got in through the cat opening and was shuffling around this house where they had sweet black-and-white rounds in plastic—”
“Oreos. We should discuss their exact whereabouts at a later date. Tell me what he saw.”
“My cousin heard the door shake, then he saw the silver handle turning and he panicked and died.”
The junco spit out more unintelligible insults in a disbelieving manner. “He died figuratively?” I tried to clarify.
“No, like how I die when there’s danger, I can just drop dead like this.” He passed away in front of us, tongue hanging out. I’d seen a buttload of death lately and this was very convincing.
“What did The One Who Opens Doors look like?” I pressed him.
The opossum resurrected himself. “He can’t say for sure due to being dead and everything. But, he sounded like this...” He made a kind of indeterminate whooshing noise. “And he said he smelled like old smells, like old grass and leaves and things. Like hay kind of. And also old stuff.”
“YOU IDIOTS!” yelled the junco. “He didn’t even see him! What use are you, you damned sea anemone!”
Everyone gasped. Obviously the junco was a little unstable, but this was some serious line crossing. Calling someone a sea anemone was harsh; sea anemone are the mob bosses of the ocean, venom harpooning their enemies and striking sticky deals with shifty types when it suits. Also, their mouths happen to be their anuses.
The mole, the opossum, and I rose above the name-calling.
“What about you, mole? What do you know about The One Who Opens Doors?”
The mole sat up and rubbed his pink fingers together. A monocle. He definitely needed a monocle. He talked slowly, as if his words were stuck in soil. “I’ll tell you alls I know. See, this was a while ago, see, ’cause we dark-soil moles have been doing our Great Migration, see? Anyways, I’d tunneled my way through the soil, had a few worms to keep my energy up, and ’cause my wife says I have to keep regular too, sometimes I get gas—”
“MAKE YOUR POINT, YOU HAGFISH!” screeched the junco.
The opossum bared its needles again and I actually saw the mole’s eyeballs. This junco was really riling everyone up. You don’t hurl a hagfish comparison around willy-nilly; no one wants to be associated with a blind, toothless tube that gets its jollies entering any orifice of a corpse to consume it inside out while producing up to seventeen pints of mucus.
“Hey! Calm down right now, Junco!” I made it clear I didn’t have time to waste. I had a Dennis to return to and the longer I was away from him, the harder it was to breathe. “What did you see, Mole?”
“Well, my eyesight’s a bit shit, but yeah, yeah, I saws that he was very, very tall. And he moved in sweepy sweeping motions, and my thinking was that if I didn’t gets back to my wife, she’d start whacking me again, so I dove back into The Other World—”
The Other World. Onida had spoken of it. “What’s ‘The Other World’?” I asked, instantly receiving horrified looks from the unlikely trio.
“The Other World, you know, Web,” said the Mole. “Under the soil. Yous can’t go there, but you must have heard about it?” When I didn’t respond, his nose twitched fiercely, his hands raking the soil around him. “It’s sort of like lots and lots of talking and good information. My wife always says—”
“Shut up, YOU MUSHROOM TIP!” screamed the junco. This was an epic interspecies insult because not only is that MoFo slang for the head of a johnson, but also, the part of the mushroom above ground—the part sold at Albertsons and sitting on your pizza—is actually its sexual organ. The sexual escapades of fungi are a multifarious rabbit hole that, thankfully, I had too much on my plate to ponder. The junco then spoke again, with reverence in his tart voice for the first time.
“The Other World is the underground. Where the truths come from. The intricate snaking of magical message pathways, a labyrinth of fungal threads that share knowings, teach us the ways. It is the communication hotbed of the underlings. It’s made up of the real part of the forest, the roots, magical mycelium, red and yellow mineral horizons…it’s the foundation of the fo
rest, the Very Beginning. That’s where trees really talk, where they share their legacy through the elements, whispering through water, negotiating in nitrogen, prophesying in phosphorus”—I’m sort of filling in parts here; it’s very hard to simplify and translate—“sage, mystic maple—their wise carbon council is available to those who listen to the stillness. The Truths of our world are sourced directly from The Other World. It is known as Web. And it’s all run—well, mostly everything on earth that we depend on is run—by The Mother Trees. You know about them at least, right?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, flaming filberts! The Mother Trees are the matriarchs, the connectors of the forest, the leaders of The Other World. We feathereds honor them with seed offerings. Web is denser and richer than Aura and Echo put together. Surely you know some of this? This is hatchling stuff.”
The mole suddenly seemed a bit euphoric. “Under the soil is like…magical…and that’s how the trees truly talk, none of the aboveground whisperings that take so much of their energy. It’s not their real language, see? That’s why, if they’re talking to you, yous better be listening, because they are making a mighty fine effort.” He rubbed those delicious fingers together.
I knew Aura and Echo, but Web? What other entire worlds within the planet I’ve inhabited don’t I know anything about? My corvid brain was spinning. “What did it look like? The One Who Opens Doors?” I asked.
“Probably grayish-black in color, maybe with a hint of green. There might have been some moss on him. Maybe. I’m not sure. I could definitely swear that I maybe, possibly saw some moss,” said the mole.
The wind-up toy of a junco had had it, spasming into some sort of meltdown on the branch of a hawthorn. “You fig-brained morons!”
“STOP!” I cawed. “While you are bickering, there are animals that don’t belong in this city—gorilla, hippo, elephant—running amok. Someone let them out of their enclosures, someone who can open doors and I intend to find that someone. So, tell me what you know NOW.”
“Yup, yup, yup.” The junco resumed its nervous hopping. “It came down this way and I followed it. It can crawl and climb and goes wherever it wants to.”
“Feathered?”
“No.”
“Fur?”
“Some.”
“Scales?”
“Um, I think sort of. Kind of…like a coconut? Yup, yup, yup.” It was clear that Mensa wouldn’t be calling for these three anytime soon, MoFo extinction notwithstanding. The junco continued: “It had red hair and wore a wrap.” What he actually said translates as “wrap around the torso,” or in other words, “a shirt.”
The world tilted.
“What did you just say?” I asked.
“Red hair. Shirt.”
“You saw a MoFo?” My heart was a horse galloping across the plains. The junco didn’t understand. “It walked on two legs…it was a Hollow?” Adrenaline burned a hole in my chest.
“Yes. The One Who Opens Doors is a Hollow. Last I saw, he was heading to the zoo.” (Small fact for you here: the rough translation of “zoo” in bird twitter is “creature quilt” because that’s what it looks like from above, a blanket made up of species-separated enclosures.) The junco continued: “You should have let me speak first, I already put out a call to Aura and I heard back from birds around the Phinney Ridge area, The One Who Opens Doors is there!”
Hope roared its luminous flames to life in my breast. With my brainy, MoFo reasoning, I’d figured The One Who Opens Doors was responsible for letting out the zoo animals in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood since I’d first heard his name there on Aura, and it made perfect sense that he was still in the area. But, oh, to hear that he was MoFo! I had never given up hope and it had paid off! There was one MoFo out there, which meant there were more MoFos, which meant that everything was going to be okay. It was time to get to the zoo and find a way to make him my ally. I was The One Who Keeps, a bewildering nickname, but a special nickname for me nonetheless.
I put out another call to Aura, projecting passionately over the hawthorns, the park’s sprawling nest of bramble and knotweed, reaching across the Seattle skyline with my voice. I needed to know if anyone had heard from my bow-legged partner and the little ruby-crowned kinglet who’d gone after him. How stupid of me to send such a tiny bird—what was a ruby-crowned kinglet going to do in the face of a hippo? I made my nictitating membranes shut out the world momentarily, but they couldn’t shut out the vision of a flooded stadium teeming with sick MoFos. Twitter erupted as nuthatches and American goldfinches and even house wrens—who are known to stab other birds in the head for very minor infractions—called out, spreading the word. But I couldn’t wait because my heart was now on fire, and I shot into the air like a BrahMos missile, higher and higher and higher, until the tree crowns were thumbtacks and the freeways were gray strings. I shouldn’t have left Dennis alone. I should have been taking care of him. I scanned, looking for the fawn hue of a bloodhound, flapping like a lunatic toward CenturyLink Field, but I couldn’t stop the horrible images that flooded my mind—Dennis sitting alone by the blue trash can with the Seahawks emblem. And then, enraged because a squirrel has raced up and flashed his junk, Dennis takes off after the little pervert, knocking over the trash can and disappearing, getting swallowed whole by the new wilderness we live in. A world where sharp things—brambles, teeth, and broken glass—rule supreme. I thought of the rotting crush of sick MoFos with snapping jaws and the size of the hippo—thousands of pounds of territorial killing machine, with tusk-weapons for teeth—and I just couldn’t bear it. I knew I was about to have a heart attack and tumble from the sky.
Dots of movement stirring below. Deer. A flash streaked across an empty road—a cat, perhaps. Then a brown spot caught my eye. Yes, fawn, the tawny color of a Dennis. I started my descent, allowing gravity to guide me down, down, and as I neared, my throat closed up. The brown lump was on its side next to an oval pool of red. No, no, no, no, no. I dropped faster than ever before, until I could make out the dog shape, the damage done to canine legs, the torn skin, tufts of fur catching a ride on the wind. Then I was hovering above with stone insides, sucking in breath and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” to the brown dog I didn’t know. The brown dog that wasn’t a Dennis. Relief flooded me. It felt like singing along to Bon Jovi with Big Jim, or when you think the Pringles are all gone but you stick your head inside the canister and THERE ARE MORE HIDING AT THE BOTTOM! Not Dennis! Not Dennis! I flapped steadily, moving my head side to side to get a better look at the body. It was a Rhodesian ridgeback, a breed characterized by the stiff Mohawk that runs the opposite way down its back, and it had lost its last fight. And then I felt like screaming and cursing whatever had done this to such a magnificent dog. A dog carefully bred and selected and loved by MoFos. This is why I had to free the domestics, to rally them together, because we were losing our civilized fauna, the ones who knew about loyalty, purpose, and MoFo magnificence. I quickly lifted to a sweet gum tree to recover and to make sure I wasn’t in reach of whatever had taken out a dog that was bred to hunt lions. If this formidable specimen hadn’t made it, what chance did Dennis have? My inner pilot light started to snuff out. I needed my murder more than ever. Where was my Dennis? If he ended up like this shell of a Rhodesian ridgeback, there would be no one to blame but me.
A skittish cat—a white and marmalade firework—shot across the road, disappearing into the bushes.
And then from the shadow of a cluster of American hornbeam trees, Dennis appeared with a bird on his head. He lumbered forward with his loose skin and those silly, silly paws and his big, beating heart and I cried out in joy. That burl-nosed butt pumpkin was smiling at me! I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so ecstatic, light as a damned flight feather! The ruby-crowned kinglet bobbed along on his head and as they neared, carefully avoiding the Rhodesian ridgeback, may he rest in peace, I realized what Dennis was carrying in his slobbering, flopping jowl-ed mouth. He had a goddamned b
ag of Cheetos®, that crazy hound. I called out to him in English, using the back of my throat and doing my very best Big Jim, “Good boy, Dennis! Fuck!” And when they got close enough, I pulled his tail and fluttered around him. He dropped the Cheetos® and play-bit at the air, lunging at me with his goofball smile. Good ol’ Dennis. What a champ. I blabbed at him, telling him that a MoFo was alive and well and that we were going to find him and the world would make sense again. Heavens to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, it felt good to be alive!
I thanked the kinglet and told him that, though I appreciated his efforts, the position of riding Dennis had already been filled. He seemed to understand. He told me that Dennis had already almost found me at the park on his own—he figured he’d used his amazing nose—but had veered off on another scent trail, which turned out to be for the miraculous bag of Cheetos®. Together we trekked our way back to the park, where I doled out the Cheetos®, splitting them among Dennis, the mole, the opossum, the junco, and myself, which meant that everyone else got four while Dennis and I got twelve, because as I’ve said before, my counting is so terrible. So with light hearts and bellies full of Day-Glo orange magic, we set off on a quest to find a MoFo who looked like a coconut that could open doors.
Chapter 14
S.T.
Just Outside Dr. Jose Rizal Park, Seattle, Washington, USA
Hollow Kingdom Page 10