by Alan Cumyn
Unless, of course, he wasn’t quite looking at her. She glanced behind. Another pterodactyl, the one she’d glimpsed sometimes flying near them, now stood a distance away, wings folded, staring back at Pyke.
They were gigantic, these two, surrounded by the crows.
They pulled each other like planets entering mutual orbit.
She did not move, the female pterodactyl. She didn’t have a crest. The back of her head was rounded. She was smaller. Her feet were yellow. She looked . . .
“Jocelyne?” Shiels cried out.
Jocelyne’s gaze did not waver. It was Pyke who moved first, stumbling toward her, while Jocelyne stayed where she was, quietly catching her breath the way she did when she had broken some record on yet another long-distance run. Pyke staggered to her on the uneven footing, hop-hipping, his wings spread but clearly too weak for any more flight, at least for now. Jocelyne flew at him—he leapt at her, more than anything else—and they collided and locked wings. They spun and fell together with the crows swarming around them, cushioning their fall.
“No way!” Shiels yelled, picking past the ice chunks as she stepped toward them. “No way do you get to fly me here to watch you have pterodactyl sex yet again!”
The crows scattered, the lovers looked at her like something they didn’t understand.
“Why am I here? Am I supposed to become a pterodactyl too? Part of the harem? Where are my wings?”
The wind shrieked, her body was chilled through. The two pterodactyls were not talking . . . not talking to her.
“Because I’m not doing it. I’m not! I had a life . . . I have a life! I’m human. Do you understand that?”
It was like yelling at the wind. Pyke—he thought he was God’s gift, he thought he could just scoop her up and fly her against her will . . . practically against her will . . . all the way to this frozen stretch of—
It felt like the spell broke, like the sudden cracking of ice, like those endless pictures of glaciers falling away into the ocean. (What was the word? Calving.) This wasn’t her place. This wasn’t her. She was human, she had to . . .
Get over this hallucination, this ridiculous romantic fascination that had so upended her life! Pyke didn’t love her. He loved her shoes, for God’s sake. He wanted her to grow wings and a beak, to repopulate the world with shrieking little baby pterodactyls! But she was human, she had a brain, a life, a plan to go to college. All right, it wasn’t flying above the clouds for hours against the sun, but it was her life, hers.
“I’m human!” she screamed at him.
She had to act like a human, she had to . . . organize something.
Heat, for example. She wasn’t some flying, writhing, shrieking beast. She was not equipped. Her teeth were rattling now, she had barely recovered control of her limbs, her gut was a chunk of ice. She had read about hypothermia. This was a crucial stage. She needed fire, she needed . . .
She thudded off to the nearest abandoned shack. What was this, a mining community of some sort, disappeared now back into the bush? The walls slouched, the roof was partially caved in. How old was it? No way to tell. The door was frozen shut.
For God’s sake!
She kicked at it, the wood splintered, she fought her way through.
(How could she have fallen in love with a shrieking pterodactyl?)
She needed fire. It was truly black inside for a moment, but then her eyes adjusted. She hurried past the collapsed beams into the middle, to what used to be the kitchen. To a crumbling counter. To drawers . . . that would not open. The wood had jammed into place with the awful settling of the house. . . .
If Shiels ever survived this, what was she going to say to Jocelyne’s mother? “It’s all right, Mrs. Legault. They fly, hunt, and fish together. I’m sure Jocelyne will be wonderful at hatching the young.”
Jocelyne’s mother, who might not be alive too much longer anyway.
A rusted oil drum crowded everything. Shiels almost knocked it over, getting to another drawer, which did open—old, cold cutlery. And in the drawer below: paper napkins, still wrapped in crinkly plastic that fell off when she picked up the package.
She could use the drum to house the fire. The paper to grow it.
She had no matches.
Outside, the screaming of the crows, and now of Pyke and Jocelyne, reached new heights. The beasts and birds were all warm with their movements, she felt sure, but she was going to freeze senseless in the next few minutes. Already her fingers, her hands were reacting spastically—she wasn’t sure she could light a match now even if she were to find one.
The drum smelled oily. Maybe just a spark would do it.
She was no Girl Scout. Rub two sticks together? She didn’t have two sticks. She pushed the paper napkins into the drum. They fell in a clump. In reaching down to spread them out, she felt frozen chunks of old burned logs. So the drum had been used for fire before.
There might be matches.
She would never have Pyke. Couldn’t have him! Impossible. Not all for herself. Yet she’d fallen anyway.
In the cupboard above the sink—nothing.
She wanted to live.
She wanted to go to college. She wanted to pay back her parents the lost bail money, and raise a hundred times that for the boy who’d nearly lost his arm. All her fault! Because of her infatuation with a freak of nature. Because of what that freak had unleashed inside her.
She had things to do with her life!
Another cupboard near the rusted fridge. The blasted thing opened finally. . . . A dead, frozen rat fell out and bonked the counter.
“Ah!”
Right beside the glass jar of matches that had been in front of Shiels’s face all along.
What did Pyke think she wanted to be, anyway—a freaking pterodactyl?
Her fingers worked. Barely. The first two matches fizzled, but the third flamed long enough for her to drop it into the drum, which did indeed have the residue of something oily. It leapt into flame so suddenly, Shiels had to step back. Just as quickly, it seemed, the fire died down again and Shiels regretted, in a sudden shocking thought, having thrown all the paper napkins in at once. The half-burned frozen logs would not catch fire so easily. She ripped the cupboard door off its hinges—where did that strength come from?—and splintered the board against the counter. She spilled the kindling into the drum, hoping.
She grabbed a fistful of matches—all of them—then threw them into the drum and blew and blew.
She said to herself—“I’m sorry, Sheldon. I loved you, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t act it. Didn’t treasure who you are.”
She said, “Linton, if I see you again, I want to know about your wife and your boy and girl, Don and Samantha, not about the accident but about them, who they were.”
A dull flicker of flame.
To her parents she said, “Forgive me. Forgive me! I forgive you.”
She blew till she could hardly breathe anymore. The flames licked the edges of the kindling from the smashed cupboard. So she smashed some more. She tore up some of the floorboards, the ones that were sticking up anyway. She didn’t care when she ripped her mitts and bloodied her hands.
Even Jonathan she wanted to see again. She missed that gleamy look in his eyes when he was chewing pizza and thinking about something ridiculous.
He wasn’t ridiculous. Neither was she. She had things to do with her life.
The fire grew, and she knew she was not going to die.
• • •
She was not going to die. In the growing glare of the lovely warm fire the rest of the cabin disappeared into darkness. She could hear the uproar outside getting closer, closer, but she was so soothed by the hard-won heat that it took her a while to realize her fire was drawing the pterodactyls, Pyke and Jocelyne, back to her, and with them the crows. She fed the burning drum bigger and bigger boards. Soon the flames shot up to the cracked and slumping ceiling. Soon the beasts and birds began to spill in and out the broken-down door, much as they had in the gy
mnasium after Autumn Whirl, when Pyke had summoned them to help her out.
Flashing out of the darkness, Pyke glinted in the sharp light, shrieking as if onstage. She felt her blood coursing like the dark waters under the frozen river so close by. Maybe the spell was not broken?
Is this how it happened? A sort of animal madness grows within, and Jocelyne Legault presses her way into someone else’s bedroom to mate and roil until she, too, becomes a winged thing? Was the darkened nose the start of it? Was Pyke trying to engulf Shiels in this fire now? Was this Autumn Whirl all over again?
The crows were feeding her cabin fire now, bringing twigs, branches, busted boards and scraps of faded clothing, long abandoned. Flames scratched the ceiling, leapt into the darkest corners, then retreated again, and the rising, roiling, shrieking dance of birds and beasts did not stop. Shiels remembered Jocelyne dressed in black, whirling herself, before the wrangle dance, which reinvented itself now within Shiels’s kindling body.
(She did feel a flame, a burning from within. But she was awake now, she knew what was happening.)
What was happening?
Her body floated above the flames, almost (that was how it felt), she was lighter somehow, like ash dancing on the current.
(This was not a surrender. She was awake, wide awake! It was a dance.)
A current of air.
(Sweating now. In hypothermia you end up shedding your clothes. The last remaining heat has fled your core and so you feel hot, deluded.)
But she was sweating from the dance, from genuine heat, some firestorm awakening in her.
The shrieking Pyke, up against her, crows blacker, larger than night. And Jocelyne, too, all of them writhing as the flames danced.
Dancing as the flames licked.
(“It isn’t about the dance,” Lorraine Miens said in a quiet part of Shiels’s brain still able to watch it all unfold. “You are the dance. Find out what dance you need to be.)”
This dance. This night. Dream or no dream. After all that had happened, now she was here, moving like an underground river. Her body loosening, finally. Breathing, throbbing, twisting, soaring.
There was no denying it, she had to move with it, she had to stay awake and keep her wits and . . .
In the middle of the flames.
The whole house on fire.
With the crows fanning. Pyke laughed, Jocelyne waved her new wings. . . . They were outside in a moment, the fire was just bigger, they danced around it, and those who could fly rode the updrafts. . . .
Shiels steamed from the inside. The more brightly the old cabin burned, the more the rest of the world disappeared into surrounding darkness until it was possible to believe the world was gone, the cabin had become the sun, they were all whirling around it boiling on the inside, freezing where their backs were turned to the night.
What part of it was dream? What was possible and what not? This frenzy? Hour after hour? Where did the carcass come from, carried in torn-apart pieces by crows to be set upon? Did Pyke slash it with his beak? Did Jocelyne spear and guzzle her share? Was it a wolf? A deer? Struck by a far-off car in the night and carried here by the murder of crows?
Was it carrion?
How long had it been frozen before being passed through the flames again and again, to feed their feast?
Was this the spell again, Pyke reasserting his power? If Shiels ate her share, would she cross over? Was this the cliff-edge leap that would force folded wings to crash out through the bones of her back?
She had already crossed so many lines. And she was hungry. Pyke tore a strip of flesh. He dangled it, danced with it, teased her, shook it slowly, then quickly, as she lunged, starving for it.
“I am human!” she yelled at him, and her voice was strong, full of flame.
Dream or not, maybe this was exactly where she needed to be: her frozen river, her burning cabin, her endless night.
She seized the flesh finally, gorged herself. Chilly and burned at the same time.
She grabbed more from the beak of a passing crow, fought off others, heard herself laughing.
This was her dance. Her night to feast, without fear, to burn the whole thing down.
XXXI
In the morning she awoke on a battered board not far from where the cabin fire still steamed and hissed. Sunlight trembled on one side of the surrounding hills. The river sounded louder, ever-flowing beneath the ice.
She was cold, stiff, hungry. The twisted head of a moose carcass glared at her through glassy eyes.
Really? A moose?
Yet here it was, gigantic, half-emptied, its flesh and guts spilling into the ashes.
Silence.
Shiels examined herself, and laughed—her arms were still arms, legs still legs. But oh she was sore from yesterday! Her shoulder from the landing, her hands from hanging on to Pyke so long then tearing up those boards, everything aching and stiff from the fitful few hours of cold sleep before a dying fire.
High in a fir tree she spied what seemed to be a pair of ancient handbags hanging together from a limb. Pyke and Jocelyne—they were rousing themselves too, unfolding their wings sleepily. Jocelyne pushed off, stretched out and caught an updraft as if she had been doing it all her life. Pyke sprang after her, and the two circled each other, calling and shrieking.
There were no crows. The white frozen river looked mostly innocent of any debaucheries from the night before. A few glistening black feathers littered the snow. New frost was forming on some of the cinders.
Pyke’s security bracelet lay near her feet. How had he pried it open? Had the crows, or Jocelyne, last night—
Pyke and Jocelyne circled, circled, came closer and performed a sort of flypast, swooping low toward Shiels then pulling up, shrieking, waving. She could not join them, not now, never again. She was stuck in this aching body, unfit to be a beast.
She smiled, she cried at the thought of it.
Good-bye, good-bye! the pterodactyls shrieked, and soared away.
Shiels picked up the abandoned security bracelet, clicked it shut. Was it still working? Surely the authorities would find her now, if she hung on to it. It wouldn’t be long. Her parents would have haunted the police station all day and night, urging action! Or was she beyond the reach of the signal?
She moved farther along the riverbank. There, by more abandoned shacks, was a snow-covered road. She was wearing her yellow running shoes, her torn mitts, a winter jacket not meant for wilderness.
But this was a road. A thin crust, good footing.
She could stay, she supposed, maybe even coax more heat from the remnants of last night’s fire. But it didn’t really seem to be an option. As she moved, her body began to forgive her. She started along, whacking her sides to warm herself. She was hungry but she had eaten of last night’s half-scorched roadkill moose. (Could crows bring down a moose by themselves? Even ten thousand of them?)
She began to run. It only seemed natural. She straightened herself as Linton had taught her, leaned from her ankles, tried not to overstride. Where was her breathing? (In her belly, down below.)
Her feet felt lighter than usual.
She warmed up rather quickly, considering everything, and all of her began to feel lighter.
She imagined herself suddenly becoming Jocelyne Legault (who had, after all, suddenly become a flying beast), perfectly sure and light of foot, effortless and quick, with stride after efficient stride.
She felt quick. Her eyes seemed . . . stronger. She picked out a tiny movement from all the way across the river and halfway up the hill, far in the distance. Pyke and Jocelyne, just specks now against what was becoming an astonishingly bright blue morning sky.
She could see their fine wings, could sense their hearts thrumming with the delirium of flight.
We know you, they were saying.
She felt again the warmth of clutching Pyke while he had flown her far above the Earth.
Now Pyke and Jocelyne circled higher, getting smaller, until they disapp
eared behind the sun-blessed hill. The road took a curve then too. When it straightened out again, the flying beasts were gone, swallowed by the sky. Impossible to prove they had ever been there.
She surprised herself. She reared back suddenly and, perhaps channeling Jeremy Jeffreys, hurled the security bracelet as high as she could. It soared, lodged perfectly in an upper tree branch, a startling throw. There it stayed, glowing slightly against the darkness of the fir. Surely it would not be long before a crow stole it off, some new prized possession to be deposited even deeper in the woods.
On, on she ran. It felt good now, this human body of hers, like it was made to move, to travel great distances.
Stride, stride, posture, breathing. Was this a dream? The whole thing? Just this moment, right now, seemed more real than anything could be. A curve coming. Shiels sped up, leaned into it, took it on.
Who was she? her footfalls seemed to be saying.
Who was she now?
• • •
Many turns later the road straightened out, she climbed a hill, her stride was holding. Ahead of her she saw a red pickup truck angled into the ditch, the battered hood propped open, an elderly man in a trucker’s cap, a heavy coat, and tired boots leaning into the engine. He straightened up at her approach, wiped his face with the back of his hand. He looked hurt. His forehead had a welt on it. “Are you out here—jogging? Really?” he said. “Did you frostbite your nose or something? Looks like you’re peeling.”
Her nose did feel itchy. She touched it, and a corner of skin came off, purple on the surface. In the reflection from the truck’s side mirror she could see the skin beneath was lighter, almost pink.
“Nothing serious,” she said. “What’s happened to you—are you all right?”
He smiled crookedly. “Been rattled worse in my time, I guess.” The truck really did look banged up, the body dented badly, the windshield broken but held together in parts with new-looking tape. “Blame thing. Took the wrong road last night, hit a moose come from nowhere. Bung my head up against the steering wheel. Truck’s so old, doesn’t even have an air bag. Lucky to be alive, really. Must’ve been dazed. I swear about a million crows come swarmed me, some of them dastard huge, excuse my language.”