“What?” Mr. Finch asked. He looked back at me, eyes glimmering. “Oh. Right. Well, Romulus was a good boy. A real good boy.”
“He never did nothing!” Mrs. Finch sobbed.
“That don’t help,” I said. “You gotta be specific.”
“He—he liked swimming,” Mr. Finch managed. “He’d go down to the stream—I think it runs through your property, Mrs. Nation—and he’d play in that water for whole days if the weather was hot.”
“He liked pumpkin seeds,” Mrs. Finch added. “He helped his little cousin study her letters, but he wasn’t no good at it himself. He just encouraged her, trying to be nice.”
Romulus Finch howled, a straining keen that interrupted us. Suttner tried to use one hand to adjust his spectacles, but the boy nearly bucked out from under him. Suttner struggled against the thrashing, using both hands, his knee, an elbow—anything—to keep the boy on the ground. His spectacles fell off.
“He said, when he grew up,” Mr. Finch said, weeping, “that he wanted to go to Missouri to be a newspaperman.”
“We have family in Missouri,” Mrs. Finch explained.
“But I told him he can’t get no newspaper job if he don’t do well in his schooling!”
The change was well underway now. I flipped through the Canon frantically, trying to find the chart that told you how to detect which Realm a human death was flying into. Where was that chart? I used to know its page number and contents off the top of my head.
“Someone get a bowl and fill it with water!” Suttner cried. “Quick!”
I looked down. Three rubbery slits were forming on each side of Romulus Finch’s neck. His eyes flew open: filmy and opaque. And his mouth gaped. Struggling for air.
Mr. Finch ran into the house.
Moments later, Romulus Finch was a fish, slipping out of our hands, shiny and wriggling. We wrestled him into the bowl. He expanded though, kept growing larger. Oh Lord, I thought, this one’s turning into a whale!
“A bucket!” Mrs. Finch said. “I’ll get a bucket! It’s bigger!”
“No!” Suttner said. “Where’s the stream? The stream you mentioned?”
Half-in, half-out, the Romulus fish splashed around in the too-small bowl. We hoisted it aloft, everyone holding the rim, and ran together down the hill and towards the stream. Romulus kept struggling to get out, and Suttner used his free hand to push the fish-head back in, dunking it underwater and keeping it there.
We dumped Romulus into the stream as soon as we found a suitable depth. The cold water rushed past our knees, and Romulus crashed in with a sploosh. We caught sight of his wavering, still-expanding form in the clear water for only a moment before he disappeared, darting downstream.
Heavy breathing. Birds. The sound of rushing water.
Mr. Finch and Mrs. Finch hugged, crying and smiling and whispering to each other. I felt happy too. Strange. Before, I never would have tolerated an Animal Realm transformation in one of my own loved ones. But today, it seemed natural and pure and right.
* * *
After looking for his spectacles and eventually giving up, Suttner and I trudged back to my farm.
The fields—the world—smelled like shit. It was not unpleasant. Suttner was wiping at his eyes. I looked down at him.
“Are you crying?”
“Dust. A lotta dust here.”
“Sure.”
He coughed, made a pretext of wandering further away from me, returned. I pushed my hands into my skirt pockets.
“So are you gonna move on then?”
“Can’t yet. Still got some injuries in town to tend to.”
“And after that?”
Suttner smiled. I could see the trails of tears on his cheeks, shining clean in the dirt. “I reckon I could help build Protection back up. For now. See to your cow, too.”
“As long as you don’t touch any of the Devil’s brew, Doc, you are more than welcome.”
He didn’t say anything.
Ahead, I saw the unattractive lump that was my home.
* * *
A prayer from Carrie Amelia Nation to Our Lord, the Holy Prince Siddhartha, Most Enlightened Being, Buddha, Liberator and Emancipator and Most Awakened Of All Creatures Ever.
Dear Lord,
Forgive me for my sins. I am a murderer and a widow and a sufferer, and I have done You wrong. I have tried to break out of the wheel, and I have failed, and I’ll probably fail forever. But by the laws of karma, I await Your true and pure punishment with a happy, open heart. Just don’t let me be born back east and don’t let me love a drunk and don’t let the crop fail, and Heaven help Kansas. These things I beg you, and that’s all. Thanks.
Amen.
Copyright © 2014 Angela Ambroz
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Angela Ambroz works at a civil society organization in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She has been previously published in Strange Horizons, GigaNotoSaurus, and Redstone Science Fiction. Her website is www.angelaambroz.com.
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COVER ART
“Pillars,” by Tomas Honz
Tomas Honz is a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, who believes in the traditional approach to art. To him, painting is a science that is necessary to acquire in order to make an art of it. He has years of experience in the entertainment industry as a concept illustrator, but his desire to create his own work, as well as a serious trauma–one of those things that make you reconsider your whole life–led him to leave that career, to open his eyes and soul to the fascinating world around him and shift his attention to traditional painting. View his work at tomashonz.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
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