by Cat Rambo
What plans might a bird hatch?
* * *
The Colonel died yesterday. Last night I dreamed of him, but he washed away and I was back in the dream.
It’s the one that comes each night. Every time, the same. I see the gas cloud hanging there, roiling with red shadows. Try as I might to dodge it, its depths swallow me again. I try to hold my breath but cannot, eventually taking a breath that sears my lungs, burns away the tissues.
I’ve stood beside Rappaccini while he dissected a corpse. I know what ordinary vocal cords look like; where they are buried in the body. Rappaccini has pointed them out to me, beneath the epiglottis, above the trachea, talking all the while about how mine must differ, scarred by the harsh gas, as though it was my throat beneath his knife.
I remember flying through the cloud, thinking that if I moved fast enough we’d escape. I told the captain to throw the blanket over himself, to crouch down. That saved him. But the crimson gas seeped into the ornithopter, fingers prying into the window cracks, drifted up through the vents. I breathed it in, swallowed it despite how each gulp burned in my throat, keeping it from reaching him.
I was lucky. Another year and they might have made me into a clank. But back then, they were still dismissing people when they were injured, not holding onto them the way they do now.
The captain came to see me in the field hospital carrier, so close to the lines that the guns still thundered to punctuate his words. He cried, though not much, just a few tears as he held my hand and told me how sorry he was, how he’d put me in for a medal. Told me that he’d look for me after the discharge.
I thought about telling him then. But I couldn’t speak; could only have tried to explain through pantomime and writing, knowing that the words would be inadequate. I couldn’t tell him enough, couldn’t say that I didn’t want him to love me for the body that had been forced on me, I wanted him to love who I was, a man loving him.
That was important. But how could I convey that to him in my poor attempts at written language, that awkward scrawl that Sister Perpetua had burned my knuckles for?
I prayed that night for guidance, the way that Father McNeil and Sister Madonna had told me that I could always do. I turned to Jesus, my friend Jesus, to tell me what I should do, how I should act, and I laid all of that in his hands.
The next morning I felt refreshed and strengthened. Jesus would help me endure. I’d tell the captain, and he would be surprised at first but accepting, or perhaps he would tell me he’d suspected it all along.
Together, we would work it all out.
They wheeled me out into the morning, and I saw him walking towards me on the deck.
The guns thundered again.
Everything was noise and confusion and shouting and the smell of blood. My ears rang, and every sound came to me as though I were underwater.
The smoke cleared, drifted down as though unable to hold itself in the air any longer, and I saw him lying there.
His head was half gone, torn away by the shell. You could see his brains, the color of cold oatmeal, darkened by burns, lying in a pool of red. His eye was open and surprised, still long-lashed and pretty.
Still so pretty, even then.
That was God’s message. That he hated me so much he would rather kill a good man than let him be sullied by my love.
God’s writing was as ugly as mine. But it told me what I needed to know. That Father McNeil and Sister Madonna were wrong.
Jesus didn’t love me. He wasn’t my friend.
He was like all the rest of them.
I could have gone back home after the war. But it wasn’t my home anymore. The school hadn’t made me white, but it made me no longer a Navajo, no longer understanding those ways or those stories. I had come to Seattle because it was so green back then, back before the factories had grimed all the trees.
I was helping clean Mr. Abernathy’s old room, readying it for the next occupant. Doctor Rappaccini had made us try to clean the wheelchair up so it could be used again, but such a stench had permeated the wicker that even he was forced to admit it would never serve another patient. The stench even clung to the room’s faded wallpaper, and I’d been directed to wipe that down with bleach-water.
I turned around and found the Doctor standing in the doorway. Jonas was perched on his shoulder. He said, “Mr. Zonnie, I’d like to talk with you.”
That phrasing made me shiver. I’d never heard him call anyone Mister before, and it wasn’t that there was respect edging the tone. Only menace.
He said, “There’s been some things reported missing. Small thefts. A wedding ring, a medal.”
I widened my eyes and looked puzzled.
“Some cheese intended for my meal,” he continued, watching my face.
I kept it impassive, trying not to react. I don’t know that I succeeded. The Doctor kept staring at me. I could smell the acrid, sour smell from the birdshit on his back. Jonah clacked his beak at me.
“You could be sent back to the war,” the doctor said. Each time he paused between words, the crow clacked its beak again. Its head darted forward and I flinched.
The doctor noticed. “You’re scared of a bird?”
I just kept still.
He said with scorn in his face, “What do you think a bird can do to you? Let’s see.”
He shrugged his shoulder. Jonah flew at me, all sharp beak and extended talons, raking at my face.
I made a noise—something rough and ragged and painful in my throat—and flung my arm up, trying to dislodge it. Warmth ran down my face and the beak plunged once, digging itself into the skin at the corner of my eye.
I rocked back, thinking he wanted my eye, that he wouldn’t be satisfied till it was gone. I doubled over, shielding my head as the crow tore at me and Rappaccini watched.
Finally the Doctor said, “Enough.”
The crow stopped stabbing at me. I heard the flap of its wings as it returned to his shoulder.
The Doctor’s voice was cold. “Tomorrow’s an inspection. Take the brass appliances and make sure they shine.”
After the two of them were gone, I washed my face, thinking of the crow dipping its claws in the berries. I stole more crystals and dropped them in water, seeing the pink tinge spread across it before I used it to wash the wounds, ignoring its sting. The damage was bad, but my eye was unscathed, despite the torn skin beside it.
I tried not to think of the crow as I washed brass limbs with soapy water before drying them and taking up the brass polish, which smelled of ammonia and dust. I tried not to think that I had been asleep while that black thing hopped across the floor, perhaps perching on the end of the bed to look at me, to watch my eyeballs rolling beneath the paper-thin skin while he thought about plucking them out.
What was the crow? Because that’s how I think of it, not by the name the doctor has given it. It seems unlikely that it is the name it would have chosen for itself.
Back with the nuns, they would have told me it was an instrument of the devil, summoned by sin, bent on taking souls down to hell, to drown in the lake of fire and brimstone. If not the devil himself, one of his imps.
Someone else might wonder if it was a human soul, born anew into the feeble body of a bird, frustrated by its lack of hands and speech, bent on destroying those born into superior bodies or else carrying out some ancient grudge incurred before it was ever hatched.
Or a skinwalker, a witch who takes on animal form?
Or maybe it was just a monster.
Just because the world held monsters didn’t mean that God had made them.
When I was done, I staggered back to my room, hands aching. Something tapped on the window. I looked up to see the crow sitting there, silhouetted against sunset’s purple sky. I thought it was Jonah. It seemed unlikely it would be any other crow come visiting. It tapped on the window again and cocked its head. It wanted me to let it in.
I didn’t move. Staring back at it, I shook my head.
That sent it into an angry frenzy. It tapped on the glass, so hard I thought it would crack the thin pane. I looked away, and that made it angrier. I stared at the wallpaper, tracing the pattern of green leaves, faded now, and the even more faded yellow flowers, so pallid they were almost imperceptible, and pretended I didn’t know it was there.
I sat down on the bed, which squeaked conversationally underneath me then fell silent. I folded my hands in front of me and stared down at them. Long-fingered hands, strong hands. Hands that had flown me through shells and explosion and death.
They fell into the shape of prayer without my even thinking about it.
Father McNeill and Sister Madonna would have approved. They would have told me that if I talked to God, he would listen. All my prayers would be answered, and that was good, even if it was in a mysterious way that you couldn’t understand at the time but which unraveled itself into meaning years later.
But I had talked to God many times, until his reply had been far too mysterious for me. Death was a shitty answer to a prayer. That betrayal still burned at me, as fresh and bitter tasting as yesterday.
I missed my friend Jesus. I used to think of him as someone I could talk to. I carried on a conversation in my mind, addressed to him, and I never worried that he wasn’t listening or didn’t want to hear what I was saying.
I’d put that away the day the captain died, the day he and God betrayed me.
I wondered if Jonah would hurt himself, the way he was squawking and flapping. I raised my head and said, not out loud but in my head: I won’t compromise myself. Take me as I am, but not any other way.
I felt the silence listening. The way Jesus used to listen.
I said, Take it or leave it.
A rap again at the window.
Maybe that was my answer. Vile creature of a viler God, a God of poison and birdshit, of malicious eyes and sooty feathers.
Let him come in, then, and give me my answer.
When I swung the window open, he exploded in at me, a wrath of feathers and squawks. Instinctively I flailed and swatted, using all my strength.
He hit the wall with a thump and a noise, quiet as a twig snapping, as his neck broke.
But he was still alive. The angry beads of his eyes glittered as he lay, a feathery lump whose only motion was the in and out of its breaths. A line of sunset-orange light played over his belly and fingered a crack in the wall, awaking an answering glint inside.
I wrapped my hand in the pillowcase before I pulled his body away from the wall. He made a rattling sound of hatred and pain, and died.
I tugged the wall board aside to widen the crack. Inside were rings, a watch, more. A cufflink set with diamonds. A $20 gold piece with the Queen’s face on it.
I felt dazed, wrapped in cotton wool that kept the world away from me, perceived through a layer of confusion or in a darkened mirror.
God had answered my prayer.
Or had he? Was the world so random that none of this meant anything?
Either everything is random, or God’s hand moves all the pieces, including me, and Father McNeill, and the Doctor, and Jonah. A God who calculates things so precisely that when a bird falls, you see the last trace of sunlight answering you. Setting you free. A patient God waiting for something so large that Jonah and I were unimportant cogs. Maybe that God calls upon us according to our nature and doesn’t care what we are, or what we call ourselves.
* * *
Tonight I’m leaving. Rappaccini has looked for Jonah all day, calling and calling, but he hasn’t thought to search the grounds yet. Eventually he will.
I’ve packed the few supplies I have. They’ll take me over the mountains, I think, into the sun.
I have a travelling companion, an old acquaintance. He’s invisible, inaudible. I don’t know what he wants, precisely. Maybe he’s a figment. Maybe he’s not.
But if I think he’s there, it comforts me. And there is so little comfort in this world.
Copyright © 2014 Cat Rambo
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Cat Rambo has worked as a programmer for Microsoft and a Tarot card reader; professions which, she claims, both involve a certain combination of technical knowledge and willingness to go with the flow. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons, among others, and her work has consistently garnered mentions and appearances in year’s best anthologies. Her collection, Eyes Like Coal and Moonlight, was an Endeavour Award finalist in 2010 and followed her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories. Visit her website at http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
CROSSROADS AND GATEWAYS
by Helen Marshall
Dajan faced east, as he did every morning, greeting the Sun with a toothy smile that split the creases of his face. His spear was planted in the sand beside him, gripped by a fist hard and calloused. The wind tugged at the bright red cloth that hung from it. The sand dunes seemed smooth as elephant bones in the morning, limned in a brilliant gold. Brown and gold—the colors of the desert. Dajan’s colors.
He shaded his eyes as he scanned the horizon. In the distance, he made out the silhouette of a man approaching. This was unexpected. So little was unexpected in the desert. So little changed. The desert was its own kind of prison—parched, loveless, limitless.
Dajan leaned against the shaft of his spear and waited.
“There are no crossroads here, Esu,” Dajan called out. The approaching stranger was naked but for the stretch of cloth about his waist. Today, Esu had the look of an old man. He wore his skin like a threadbare blanket over muscles lean and hard as baked clay. His white hair, tangled in beads and bones, gleamed against the darkness of his shoulders.
“All men are crossroads,” Esu answered with his hyena grin—mouth stretching wide, too wide, to reveal uneven teeth. “You more than most.”
Like the flickering of a flame, Esu shifted faces—ancient wanderer to teasing boy-god. The lanky body was smaller now and rounded with baby fat. The lines in his face smoothed like the wind sweeping away footprints in the sand. Still, the hyena grin was the same.
“All men are crossroads,” Esu repeated with a sly look, “and all women are gateways. It is unfortunate that you are not a woman. Women deserve gifts.”
“Women have gifts of their own,” Dajan answered cautiously.
Esu cackled at this, now turned white-haired and old once more. “As do you, as do you. Have you no questions for me, dead one?”
“No,” Dajan said. Asking questions of Esu—in any of his form—was dangerous. His tongue gave shape to lies. He was a deceiver. He broke the world apart and knitted it together as he pleased. He might grant favors, yes, but there was always a price.
“You’ve learned wisdom, I see,” Esu said as he pressed his face close. Dajan refused to flinch when the wrinkled lips whispered into his ear. “Or the desert has taught it to you. A question for a question then. What was the name of the first woman you loved?”
Dajan paused. In his mind’s eye, he saw her, hips swaying beneath the crimson cloth, mouth slightly parted, eyes full of a thousand secrets.
Silence had its own price. There had been silence for so many years. Years of wandering. Years of waiting.
“Duma,” Dajan whispered, his chest constricting at the thought. Duma. Cheetah.
Esu threw back his head and shrilled like the bird. “Did she mark you with her claws? Or did she simply run faster than you?” There was something hungry in the old man’s eyes that set Dajan on edge. “Wise, you are. Wise as a woman’s eyes. Sly as a woman’s eye. It doesn’t open easily. Did hers?”
“One question, you said.”
“Aye,” Esu crowed. “A question, a question. Would you know how to please her?”
Dajan’s throat was dry. The Sun was higher in the sky than it should have been, scorching him with its rays. The desert was no longer the warm golds and brow
ns of dawn. Instead, it had bleached into the blinding white of midday. Bone light, his people had once called that color. Only Esu’s crooked body darkened the surroundings. “Why are you here?” Dajan asked.
“Wise, of course. Always whys.” Esu grinned again, his wrinkled face broken by the white gleam of his teeth. “I have come, Dajan of the Sands, to open a gateway for you.”
* * *
“Tell me a story, hunter,” Esu said as he began to climb towards the top of the dune. His feet made tiny dimples in the sand as he walked. He had taken the face of the child: snub-nosed, heavy-lipped, and dark-eyed. The whites of his eyes seemed to dance like twin Moons.
“I thought you were here to open a gateway,” Dajan replied wryly.
“You are lost in the desert of Zamani. The past. You must see the way you have come before you go further.” He pointed at the footsteps.
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not! No one ever understands me,” Esu whined. “You are at a crossroads. Speak, and take the first step.”
Dajan knelt down and ran his fingers through the smooth sand as he mulled over the boy-god’s words. He held a handful for a moment. The grains ran in thin streams as he gathered his thoughts.
“Once,” Dajan said, “there was a hunter—very young. He had barely seen the sun of sixteen summers, but he was keen-eyed, long-armed.”
“Ah,” Esu whispered as he beckoned Dajan with his hands.
“Women thought well of him, and many had laid necklaces at his tent in hopes of a fond welcome. He decorated himself with their gifts for he was as vain as Nyani, the baboon, but he never touched the women who offered them.”
“Foolish as Nyani,” the boy-god replied with a giggle.
“Of course,” Dajan replied, “but he was keen-eyed, long-armed, so he wore each of their hearts around his neck as a trinket.
“One morning, during the Season of the Spear, he set out among the heartlands in search of antelope. Keen-eyed as he was, it was late in the day before he found a herd. As the spear left his hand, the herd scattered as if forewarned of his attack. Long-armed as he was, his throw went astray. That was when he saw her. She was... beautiful,” Dajan murmured. “Golden as the Sun and graceful as the wind through the grass. She was like him: a hunter. She was aduma.” Esu’s eyes flickered at this. “He crept towards her, careful lest she catch his scent.”