Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  Every day is a melody. Every day is riding the bounteous back of a wave.

  Click click clicks fill up my body. Clicks and whistles and squeaks, mama sends them to find me. They bounce off my slippery skin like the dappled light and dance back to mama to tell her where am I. I send my name—a song of sunlit seagrass—to show her I am here, mama, and I am the shape of happy. I am learning new things. I am here in a sea full of stars—red, purple, sun yellow with five arms—who spit out their stomachs to savor the glossy gray goop goop scoop of an oyster and then swallow their stomachs in again—schloop—among pallid blooms of algae. Algae are The Ancient Ones. Algae are swishing mystics, life growers, whose outsides sound like the floaty fingers of dead men. I am learning new things. The kelp world is full of magic and silver-finned riddles.

  Follow me here, use your fins, and be the shape of joy like me! Let’s dance with the white light, ripple over coral—pink and orange, bright as brains and tickly—home and hideaway. Here’s a little fish hiding in the swaying jelly arms of anemone. Friends. Friends know one another on the inside and like the shapes they see.

  The sounds we make—chirp, click, whistle, creak, rasp, moan, trill, and grunt—bounce off the faraway and send us pictures of what is there. In the faraway can be great web-mouth whales who sing songs that bring stories into living pictures, as real as when we chase mackerel into great glittering whirls. In the faraway can be the barking shapes of hunting seals or the lone slice of a sharp-finned hunter. And other sounds.

  Twirl to me here; there is a sea turtle combing the waters sun-slow, with shimmery shell and old algae eyes filled with salty secrets. I echo to see, sending out my creaky sounds to fill him up. The sounds come back to me, a full everything picture of sea turtle; I can even see inside him now. He is filled with quiet oval bones and the shrrrrt shrrrrt emerald seagrass he loves to graze. I think now I know his secrets. He has come a long, long way, and he carries a great weight on his back—bigger than his polished shell. He carries great worry of things to come. I close up to him and he ducks inside his shell, a shell scarred with story. He can tuck all his bones inside his shell. Everything all tucked up at home where his heart dens.

  I blow a jellyfish of a bubble and push it to my family. They show me their tidy teeth and send me sounds and call my seagrass name and drive the bubble with their cloud-colored noses, and we fill the water with squeaky rainbow sounds of bubble skin. We stay together, a together sound shape, because family is Echo. Echo, gurgling and glorious.

  I am little, but liquid lightning. This way! Swim fast like me to the surface and taste a different world, the world that gives us breath. Up there is where the water is upside down, a kingdom of gray-throat gulls. Where bzzzzz-flippered fish can fly. We jump up and laugh to the sun; she is always too busy to play. She sends us her rays and they pour gold on our skins and we thrust our sonic shapes up and over the waves, twisty like sea snakes, slicing fast through slosh and whomp swells like swordfish. And at night, the sun grows cold and white, spilling liquid pearls and calling to the ocean as a mama and her calf.

  I dive below and here is a leaf that has made a long journey from the Up world. I must show you. It has skin and veins and stories. When it lived it was a kingdom to many, bolstered by fungal friendships. What a beautifully weaved world. It listened for the crrrrrcchh crrrrchhh of a caterpillar’s crunchy jaws and responded with a treacherous chemical cavalry. It flew here like the gulls, on the back of the wind. I am careful with this little dead planet in my teeth, showing it to scritchy fizzle sea sponge and whooooosh manta ray who glides past, an under-the-water cloud.

  Me, I am slippery skinned and smiling. Our shapes glow like midnight phosphorescence, dance like bubbles of laughter. We, the Flipper and Fins, can hum through things and know all their secrets.

  Welcome to my world of water.

  Welcome to Echo.

  Chapter 8

  S.T.

  God Knows Where in the Bering Sea

  We were in a shitty little boat that bobbed above an alien world. A world of fins and algae and slippery scales. We bumped helplessly above an eerie waterline that taunted us with its secrets deep and dark below. The waves held cryptic messages. Bubbles mocked us as they burst, silent detonations, signs of mysterious movement. Or, as I suspected, farts.

  Echo was a cruel world I had done my best to keep Dee away from, despite her insatiable fascination with it. Who has time for an aqueous cesspool of a universe with no air and no books—blech! It certainly didn’t pass mustard with me. So here we were, surrounded by Black Tide and blue tide, Dee curled up like a sad little Cheeto® in the bottom of our boat as we floated above a fish urinal. Other than shivering, Dee barely moved. We were utterly reliant upon Migisi. She fished for us, draping bug-eyed catches over the edge of the boat. Dee showed no interest, staring into a pencil-line horizon, tortured by the pain of losing Oomingmak, the owls, her beautiful trees, and the beloved bees that called her name. The only family she truly knew. Was she always doomed to suffer the things I had? I worked quickly because food of Echo is to be eaten fresh, lest it become a volcanic laxative, tearing bits of fish belly and popping them into her mouth, gently encouraging her to swallow. I recited lively stories now that we were having our very own ocean adventure. I performed uplifting interpretative dances for her on the boat’s lip. I recited Emily Dickinson poetry in a plucky tone:

  “Hope” is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul

  And sings the tune without the words

  And never stops at all.

  Even a Shit Turd original:

  The sea is a watery shithole

  Full of assholes and lots of fish pee

  The sea is a salty great crap bowl

  We would much rather live in a tree.

  Our biggest problem fell on us like a tipped Belgian Blue bull. The boat was nothing but an old husk, a haven for mollusks with no snacks or provisions. I asked Migisi to please, for the love of Pabst Blue Ribbon, find us some water. She lifted to the sky without hesitation, knowing—as all creatures on this big beautiful blue know—that without it, we were going to die.

  And we waited. We waited and waited. Clouds performed shapeshifting magic tricks. The sun migrated.

  Finally, a jellyfish glubbed into view, transparent and billowing in bursts under the waterline.

  “Excuse me, sir, can you help us? We need to connect to our friends on Aura…”

  He didn’t respond, ignoring me as he pulsated in diaphanous bursts.

  “Sir, please, please help me. My friend hasn’t returned, and I need fresh water. Can you tell me how to contact someone through Echo?” It was time to name-drop. “Have you heard of Onida?”

  He didn’t answer because he was a fucking jerk, no better than an arrogant aquatic breast implant. But mostly it was because he wasn’t a jellyfish. He was actually a plastic bag.

  Dee shivered through a coal-colored night and into the next morning, when the sun elbowed its way through cotton clouds. Her stomach was hollow and her heart was heavy and we had nothing. The odd rude fish would gawk at us, protruding liver lips from the murky unknown, the dark and dangerous that glugged all around us, but I had no way to snag one. Dee could not be roused into action. And now I began to fear that something had happened to Migisi. I hated to surrender in this way, to risk alerting that colostomy bag of a giant walrus to our whereabouts, but my wings were tied. So, I called out to Aura in my desperation.

  “Help us, please! We need water!” I was very unspecific about who “we” were, settling for “I am The One Who Keeps!” because it seemed to have opened doors in the past.

  But the sky remained empty, a steely congregation of clouds. And Echo and all its salted buffoonery remained silent to my pleas. Not a blubber-brained marine mammal or a mentally unstable crab responded. Not so much as a fucking coon-striped shrimp answered our calls. There was just undulating nothingness, just painful silence, salt smells, moody skies, and miles of f
reezing ocean all around us. Oh, and I’d been right about the flatulence. Schools of herring communicate by tooting at dusk, so every day we were treated to the symphonic stylings of Les Misérables, if it were performed in fish farts. I knew we were not alone—you are never, ever alone in an ocean—but we couldn’t tell who or what was beneath us. And they seemed to want to keep it that way.

  I worried about what kind of future Dee had, if any at all. I worried about my plan to get her to Seattle, where we could hide her and be protected by the UW Bothell murder—the only way I could think to keep her breathing. I worried about why I had stopped hearing calls for help—calls that broke me to ignore—from the UW Bothell murder and from Ghubari and his pandemonium of parrots, friends from so long ago. Why had I not heard from them on Aura in the last weeks of living in Toksook Bay? I worried about the snippets and flashing stills of the world outside Toksook that Aura had played for me before we were forced to evacuate—those terrible, terrible sounds…

  I couldn’t think about it. A beautifully adapted avoidance mechanism, the MoFo part of me daydreamed when Dee slept. I thought of the past. Me caching credit cards I stole from Big Jim’s fiancée, Tiffany S. from Tinder.1 Me swooping down and stealing pizza from Tiffany S. from Tinder. Me shitting on Tiffany S.’s pillow. Me screeching, “Help, I’m kidnapped!” every time Tiffany S. was on the phone. Big Jim swaddled in an angry sunburn. Big Jim eating snickerdoodles with Nargatha, who fussed about his arteries and the Pop-Tarts that spilled from our cupboards, playfully jabbing a twiglike finger into his belly.

  Nargatha was our neighbor with silvery squiggles of hair and a Rascal 615 mobility scooter. She once rescued her beloved schnauzer named Triscuits, but she rescued Big Jim on a much more regular basis. Before Big Jim met Tiffany S. from Tinder, there had been many, many disastrous dates. Nargatha would whisk Big Jim out for drinks after every failed courtship, which got to be a considerable expense and time commitment. Big Jim was the bowerbird who couldn’t quite find the right treasures to decorate his nest or the partner to share it with. I thought about how hopeless Big Jim felt after one night at that fancy restaurant. I’d come along for dinner (bringing Old Hollywood glamour in my dapper counterfeit “service animal” vest). She called herself “Shelsea, like a shell and the sea, haaahaahaah!” and also called herself a goat yogi. She had a very distinctive laugh, like a kookaburra on quaaludes. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it a match when she settled on ordering a “beet loaf” but only after asking the waiter for an “egg-free scramble” and loudly announcing that she had “a nut allergy but only in her vagina.” She went to the restroom during the stuffed mushrooms and seemingly never found her way out. Big Jim had taken this nail in the coffin of bad dates pretty hard. Nargatha picked us up in her Subaru chariot (a jerky ride, thanks to a spirited restless legs syndrome flare-up) and took us off to a boisterous bar with burgers and beer, clutching a purse full of animal crackers for yours truly. Big Jim pelting darts, finding that booming laugh again. Nargatha dancing on restless legs. Sometimes I think we look so hard for companionship, we don’t see that we’ve had it all along. Like Dorothy and her sparkly slippers.2

  I remembered how my best buddy Dennis looked as he tore across the yard, fawn skin suspended behind him, his tongue punishing the air like a wind-whipped scarf. I remembered how he would jump onto Big Jim’s lap, both of them writhing and laughing and testing the patience of the La-Z-Boy®, me screaming at them to pull themselves together from the top of the flat-screen. I thought of light switches, and Nargatha’s golden pies and crazy kitchen dances, and the magical glow of the refrigerator. It wasn’t the natural way—certainly not the corvid way—to dwell, but I couldn’t help myself. The past is just so very persuasive, these memories a warm bath. How I missed Big Jim and my Dennis with his velvet ears and Frito feet. Grief can slam into you like a well-waxed window. But it means the ones you love aren’t lost or forgotten. They’ve made a home in your heart, which is the most permanent place of all.

  Two sunsets had bled when I noticed that Dee’s lips were parched and blue. She was still curled, imprisoned in an invisible egg on the boat’s floor. Her breathing was shallow. We had encountered no one except a bob of grudge-gripping northern fur seals who had yelled at Dee, “Give us your skin, sweetheart!” which was the cherry on my cake of hatred for Echo. I yanked out a long thread from Dee’s parka, dangling it over the side of our boat with one foot, anchoring myself with the other. I channeled Big Jim, held my beak high and puffed out my chest, concentrating on the line’s movement. I didn’t get a bite. For hours I waited, patient as a fossilized cannoli.

  I started to get desperate, my calls for help louder and louder, until my beautiful singing voice was hoarse and squawky. Dee was wishbone weak, still coiled like a fiddlehead fern in the belly of our boat. Then I became sick as a sea slug, dry heaving my desperate worry for Migisi. Where was she? I longed for land, for a full belly and a moist throat, for the friendship of our owls whom I couldn’t bring myself to think about. Even for the woolly comfort of Oomingmak’s back. I missed that Cadillac-hearted oaf and felt a beesting in my throat whenever I thought of him haloed by fire. I even missed the unctuous family tree of flies that deviled him. And I hated this horrible water world.

  Finally, we got a response. Not from Migisi or an Alaskan cruise ship of healthy MoFos or a murder of migrating crows or shit-talking seals or labia-lipped lingcod, but from the sky. It lost its temper, frowning in the sinister gray of a gun. It rumbled its complaints and sighed heavily in frigid gales. The scowling thunderheads began to cry, a MoFo mouth and corvid beak desperately gulping in its sadness. And then they threw a full-blown tantrum in the ocean. The waves gathered their frothy skirts, folding into deep rolls. The boat was tossed over their crests, plunged down into the cleavage between swells. I held tight to the bottom of the boat, stomach suspended several feet above me like a thought bubble. The waves got bigger. We teetered over their sharp whitecaps. Dee pulled me into her chest, holding on tight. Her eyes were squeezed shut and under her breath she hummed the song of bees.

  “Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmmm.”

  She was petrified, the winds slicing at her cheeks. She clutched the little black being who loved her most in this world as she uttered MoFo words in her strange crow English, words I had taught her in a language she hated as she searched for comfort.

  “Danger! Danger!”

  I couldn’t formulate a plan—I couldn’t do anything against the ocean’s wrath—and so we were battered around in the little toy boat. Water pirated through the eroded holes just under the lip of the old boat. She started to fill, gargling salt water. Dee shrieked and yelled at the winds, “Scrreeeedeee!” And the winds roared back, abusing the sea with the roar of Tiffany S. when I plopped the contents of her little pink pillbox into the seabound water of the toilet, along with her bottle of Chanel N°5. What? It’s called eau de toilette!

  Roiling water fizzed around Dee’s feet. She stopped calling out, humming her song of the hive. A great wave gathered its confidence ahead of us. We watched, biting our tongues. The wave lifted high and did its worst. The boat was swallowed in one gulp. Dee gasped as the icy water of Echo slapped her skin. I heard a thump, limbs striking wood, and then Dee was thrown into the ocean. I was knocked from her strong fingers. A great gust of wind thrust me into the air, then I plunged into the horrifying world of Echo.

  It was deafening.

  Dark and blue and angry, a deadly washing machine of whipped particles and sand, screaming krill, and the weak wails of bewildered phytoplankton too small to fight it. The currents were all-powerful, dragging their claws this way and that way, ferocious sultans of salt and seaweed. Sounds attacked me—roaring, bubbling, thundering, shrieking shrimp, and a terrifying clicking sound that felt like a showering of bullets whizzing past me. Karma, that green-eyed goddess, flashed her bloomers and both middle fingers. In the stomach of the storm, I was powerless, just one of Tiffany S.’s tiny toilet pills, sluicing along a sewer pipe alon
g with all the lowercase shit turds. I kicked with every ounce of energy I had, flapping waterlogged wings to get Up, Shit Turd, swim up! Get to Dee! I punched my beak through the waterline, sucking in the howling winds. A salt river rushed in and I spluttered, vomiting fish pee. I wrestled with the waterline, kicking against currents to stay at the surface to scan for my nestling.

  There she was.

  Dee’s tree-scaling legs kicked and thrashed. She fought an ocean to get to me, snatched me up in the clutch of her hand, punching the sky to keep me above the wrath of a wave. Dee screamed from her spleen as waves enacted white-lipped anger, smashing and spitting around us. An enormous wave gathered itself above us in that slow, steady build, as if calling on the power of some mythical creature of the deep. We had nowhere to hide, both of us screaming like kidding goats, and it was no joke as it crashed down on us as if a ginormous fucking wave was crashing down on us and we were plunged back into that awful, deadly world of water so very, very desperate to drown us. I held my breath, lungs on fire, flapping and hoping because that’s what I did best. I opened my eyes in that terrifying underwater world to a sting of salt, and there, in the boiling water, was a great dark mass.

  Oh fuck.

  A great moving mass that carved the currents, slicing through the squalling spasms of a sea storm. My heart thundered out a particular three-note cello theme song that had convinced MoFos they were but helpless chicken tenders in the honey BBQ sauce of the ocean. I squawked in panic, losing the precious air I had left. The horrible bullet shower of clicks whizzed around me, into me. I thrashed my toothpick legs, thrown to the sea surface again by a confusion of currents. Above water I could see again. Against the icy ire of waves and a glowering granite sky was a fin that cut from the chaos and rose to the clouds. I spun, wet wings slapping the ocean’s surface, locating my nestling.