At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  Ponies

  The invitation card has a Western theme. Along its margins, cartoon girls in cowboy hats chase a herd of wild Ponies. The Ponies are no taller than the girls, fat and bright as butterflies, with short, round-tipped unicorn horns and small fluffy wings. At the bottom of the card, newly caught Ponies mill about in a corral. The girls have lassoed a pink-and-white Pony. Its eyes and mouth are surprised round Os. There is an exclamation mark over its head.

  The little girls are cutting off its horn with curved knives. Its wings are already removed, part of a pile beside the corral.

  You and your Pony ___[and Sunny’s name is handwritten here in puffy girl-letters]___ are invited to a cutting-out party with TheOtherGirls! If we like you, and if your Pony does okay, we’ll let you hang out with us.

  “Yay!” Sunny says. “I can’t wait to have friends!” She reads over Barbara’s shoulder, her rose-scented breath woofling through Barbara’s hair. They are in the big backyard next to Sunny’s pink stable.

  Barbara says, “Do you know what you want to keep?”

  Sunny’s tiny wings are a blur as she hops into the air, loops and then hovers, legs curled under her. “Oh, being able to talk, absolutely! Flying is great but talking is way better!” She drops to the grass. “I don’t know why any Pony would keep her horn! It’s not like it does anything!”

  This is the way it’s always been, as long as there have been Ponies. All ponies have wings. All Ponies have horns. All Ponies can talk. Then all Ponies go to a cutting-out party with AllTheGirls and they give up two of the three, because that’s what has to happen if a Girl is going to fit in with TheOtherGirls. The Ponies must all keep their voices because Barbara’s never seen one that still had her horn or wings after her cutting-out party.

  Barbara sees TheOtherGirls’ Ponies all the time, peeking in the classroom windows just before recess or clustered at the bus stop after school. They’re baby pink and lavender and daffodil-yellow, with flossy manes in ringlets and tails that curl to the ground. When not at school and cello lessons and ballet class and soccer practice and play group and the orthodontist’s, TheOtherGirls spend their days with their Ponies.

  The party is at TopGirl’s house, which has a mother who’s a pediatrician and a father who’s a cardiologist and a small barn and giant trees shading the grass where the Ponies are playing games. Sunny walks out to them nervously. They touch her horn and wings with their velvet noses and then the Ponies all walk out to the lilac barn at the bottom of the pasture where a bale of hay is broken open for them.

  TopGirl meets Barbara at the fence. “That’s your Pony?” she says without greeting. “She’s not as nice as mine.”

  Barbara is defensive. “She’s beautiful!” She knows this is a misstep and adds, “Yours is so pretty!” And TopGirl’s Pony Starblossom is pretty. Her tail is every shade of purple and glitters with stars; but Sunny’s tail is creamy white and shines with honey-colored light, and Barbara knows that Sunny’s the most beautiful Pony ever.

  TopGirl walks away, saying over her shoulder, “There’s Rock Band in the family room and a bunch of TheOtherGirls are hanging out on the deck and Mom bought some cookies and there’s Coke Zero and Diet Red Bull and diet lemonade.”

  “Where are you?” Barbara asks.

  “I’m outside,” TopGirl says so Barbara gets a Crystal Light and three frosted raisin-oatmeal cookies and follows her. TheOtherGirls outside are listening to an iPod plugged into speakers and playing Wii tennis and watching the Ponies play HideAndSeek and Who’sPrettiest and ThisIsTheBestGame. They are all there, SecondGirl and SuckUpGirl and EveryoneLikesHerGirl and the rest. Barbara only says anything when she thinks she’ll get it right. It seems as though it’s going okay.

  And then it’s time. TheOtherGirls and their silent Ponies collect in a ring around Barbara and Sunny. Barbara feels sick.

  TopGirl says to Barbara, “What did she pick?”

  Sunny looks scared but answers her directly. “I would rather talk than fly or stab things with my horn.”

  TopGirl says to Barbara, “That’s what Ponies always say.” She gives Barbara a curved knife with a blade as long as a woman’s hand.

  “Me?” Barbara says. “I thought someone else did it, a grownup.”

  TopGirl says, “Everyone does it for their own Pony. I did it for Starblossom.”

  In silence Sunny stretches out a wing.

  It’s not the way it would be, cutting a real pony. The wing comes off easily, smooth as plastic, and the blood smells like cotton candy at the fair. There’s a shiny trembling oval where the wing was as though Barbara cut rose-flavored Turkish Delight in half and saw the pink under the powdered sugar. Barbara thinks, It’s sort of pretty, and throws up.

  Sunny shivers, her eyes shut tight. Barbara cuts off the second wing and lays it beside the first.

  The horn is harder, like paring a real pony’s hooves. Barbara’s hand slips and she cuts Sunny and there’s more cotton-candy blood. And then the horn lies in the grass beside the wings.

  Sunny drops to her knees. Barbara throws the knife down and falls beside her, sobbing and hiccuping. She scrubs her face with the back of her hand and looks up at the circle. “Now what?”

  Starblossom touches the knife with her nose, pushes it toward Barbara with one lilac hoof. “You’re not done yet,” TopGirl says. “Now the voice. You have to take away her voice.”

  “But I already cut off her wings and her horn!” Barbara throws her arms around Sunny’s neck. “Two of the three, you said!”

  “That’s the cutting-out, yeah,” TopGirl says. “That’s what you do to be OneOfUs. But the Ponies pick their own friends and that costs, too.” Starblossom tosses her violet mane. For the first time Barbara sees that there is a scar shaped like a smile on her throat. All the Ponies have one.

  “I can’t!” Barbara tells TheOtherGirls, TopGirl, Starblossom, Sunny. But even as she cries until her face is caked with snot and tears, she knows she’s going to. When she’s done she picks up the knife and pulls herself upright.

  Sunny stands up beside her on trembling legs. She looks very small without her horn, her wings. Barbara’s hands are slippery. She tightens her grip.

  “No,” Sunny says suddenly. “Not even for friends. Not even for you.”

  And Sunny spins and runs, runs for the fence in a gallop as fast and beautiful as a real pony’s. But there are more of the others and they are bigger, and Sunny doesn’t have her wings to fly or her horn to fight. They pull her down before she can jump the fence into the woods beyond. Sunny cries out and then there is nothing, only the sound of pounding hooves from the tight circle of Ponies.

  TheOtherGirls stand, frozen, their blind faces turned toward the Ponies.

  The Ponies break their circle, trot away. There is no sign of Sunny beyond a spray of cotton-candy blood and a coil of her mane torn free and fading as it falls to the grass.

  Into the silence TopGirl says, “Cookies?” Her voice sounds fragile and false. TheOtherGirls crowd into the house, chattering in equally artificial voices. They start up a game, drink more Diet Coke. Soon they sound almost normal.

  Barbara stumbles after them into the family room. “What are you playing?” she says uncertainly.

  “Why are you here?” FirstGirl says, as though noticing her for the first time. “You’re not OneOfUs.”

  TheOtherGirls nod. “You don’t have a pony.”

  The Cat Who Walked

  a Thousand Miles

  Chapter 1

  The Garden

  At a time now past, a cat was born. This was not so long after the first cats came to Japan, so they were rare and mostly lived near the capital city.

  This cat was the smallest of her litter of four. Her fur had been dark when she was born but as she grew it changed to black with speckles of gold and cinnamon and ivory. She had a little gold-colored chin, and her eyes were gold, like a fox’s.

  She lived in the gardens of a great house in the capital. They fil
led a city block and the house had been very fine once but that was many years ago. The owners moved to a new home in a more important part of the city, and left the house to suffer fires and droughts and earthquakes and neglect. Now there was very little left that a person might think of as home. The main house still stood but the roofs leaked and even had fallen in places. Furry green moss covered the walls. Many of the storehouses and other buildings were barely more than piles of wood. Ivy filled the garden and water weeds choked the three little lakes and the stream.

  But it was a perfect home for cats. The stone wall around the garden kept people and dogs away. Inside, cats could find ten thousand things to do. There were trees and walls to climb, bushes to hide under, corners to sleep in.

  Food was everywhere. Delicious mice skittered across the ground and crunchy crickets hopped in the grass. The stream was full of slow, fat frogs. Birds lived in the trees and occasionally a careless one came within reach.

  The little cat shared the grounds with a handful of other female cats. Each adult claimed part of the gardens, where she hunted and bore her kittens alone; but the private places all met at the center like petals on a flower, in a courtyard beside the main house. The cats liked to gather here and sleep on sunny days, or to groom or watch the kittens playing. No males lived in the garden except for boy-kittens who had not gotten old enough to start their prowling, but tomcats visited and a while later there were new kittens.

  The cats shared another thing: their fudoki. The fudoki was the collection of stories about all the cats that had lived in a place. It described what made it a home and what made the cats a family. Mothers taught their kittens the fudoki. If the mother died too soon, the other cats, the aunts and cousins, would teach the kittens. A cat with no fudoki was a cat with no family, no home and no roots. The small cat’s fudoki was many cats long and she knew them all—The Cat From The North, The Cat Born The Year The Star Fell, The Dog-Chasing Cat.

  Her favorite was The Cat From The North. She had been her mother’s mother’s mother’s aunt, and her life seemed very exciting. As a kitten she lived beside a great hill to the north. She got lost when a dog chased her and tried to find her way home. She escaped many adventures. Giant oxen nearly stepped on her. Cart wheels almost crushed her. A pack of wild dogs chased her into a tree and waited an entire day for her to come down. She was insulted by a goat that lived in a park. She stole food from people. She met a boy but she ran away when he tried to pull her tail. At last she came to the garden. The cats there called her The Cat From The North and as such she became part of the little cat’s fudoki.

  The ancestors and the aunts were all clever and strong and resourceful. More than anything, the little cat wanted to earn the right for her story and name to be remembered alongside theirs. And when she had kittens, she would be part of the fudoki that they would pass on to their own kittens.

  The other cats had started calling her Small Cat. It wasn’t an actual name but it was a beginning. She knew she would have a story worth telling someday.

  Chapter 2

  The Earthquake

  One day, it was beautiful and very hot. It was August, though overnight the first leaf in the garden had turned bright yellow. A duck bobbed on the lake just out of reach but the cats were too lazy to care as they dozed in the courtyard or under the shadow of the trees. A mother cat held down her kitten with one paw as she licked her ears clean, teaching her the fudoki as she did so. Small Cat wrestled, not very hard, with an orange-striped boy-kitten almost old enough to leave the garden.

  A wind started. The duck on the lake burst upward with a flurry of wings, quacking with panic. Puzzled, Small Cat watched it race across the sky. There was nothing to scare the duck, so why was it so frightened?

  Suddenly the ground heaved underfoot. An earthquake. Small Cat crouched to keep her balance while the ground shuddered, as though it were a giant animal stretching itself after waking up and she a flea clinging to its hide. Tree branches clashed against one another. Leaves rustled and rained down. Just beyond the garden walls, people shouted, dogs barked, horses whinnied. There was a crashing noise like a pile of pottery falling from a cart—which is exactly what it was. A temple bell rang as it tossed in its frame. And the strangest sound of all: the ground itself groaned.

  The older cats had been through earthquakes before, so they crouched wherever they were and waited for it to end. Small Cat knew of earthquakes through the stories but she’d never felt one. She hissed and looked for somewhere safe to run, but everything around her rose and fell. It was wrong for the earth to move!

  The old house cracked and boomed. Blue pottery tiles slid from the roof to shatter in the dirt. A wood beam in the main house broke in half with a cloud of flying splinters. The roof collapsed in on itself, and crashed into the building with a wave of white dust. The crash was too much for even the most experienced cats, and they ran in every direction.

  Small Cat staggered and fell. Cones and needles rained down from a huge cedar tree. It was shaking, but trees shook all the time in the wind so maybe it would be safer up there. She bolted up the trunk. She ran through an abandoned birds’ nest tucked on a branch, the babies grown and flown away and the adults nowhere to be found. A squirrel chattered as she passed it, more upset by Small Cat than the earthquake.

  Small Cat paused and looked down. The ground had stopped moving. As the dust settled, she saw most of the house and garden. The courtyard was piled with beams and branches, but there was still an open space to gather and tell stories, and new places to hunt or play hide-and-seek. It was still home.

  Aunts and cousins emerged from their hiding places. Slinking or creeping or just trotting out, they were too dusty to tell who was who, except for The Cat With No Tail, who sniffed and pawed at a fallen door. Other cats hunched in the remains of the courtyard, or paced about the garden, or groomed themselves as much for comfort as to remove the dirt. She didn’t see everyone.

  She fell asleep the way kittens do, suddenly and all at once and wherever they happen to be. She had been so afraid during the earthquake that she fell asleep lying flat on a broad branch with her claws sunk into the bark.

  When she woke up with her whiskers twitching, the sun was lower in the sky. What had awakened her? The air had a new smell, bitter and unpleasant. She wrinkled her nose and sneezed.

  She crept along a branch until she saw out past the tree’s needles and over the garden’s stone wall.

  The city was on fire.

  Chapter 3

  The Fire

  Fires in the capital were even more common than earthquakes. Buildings were made of wood with paper screens and straw mats. In August the gardens were dry, the weeds so parched that they broke like twigs. Across the city, a lamp tipped over in the earthquake. No one noticed until the fire leapt to a bamboo blind and then to a wall and from there into a garden, and by that time it couldn’t be stopped.

  Smoke streamed across the city: thin white smoke where grass sizzled, thick gray plumes where some great house burned. The smoke concealed most of the fire, even though in places the flames were as tall as trees. People fled through the streets wailing or shouting, and their animals added to the din. But beneath those noises, even at this distance, the fire roared.

  Should she go down? Other cats in the fudoki had survived fires—The Fire-Tailed Cat, The Cat Who Found The Jewel—but the stories didn’t say what she should do. Maybe one of her aunts or cousins could tell her but where were they?

  Smoke drifted into the garden.

  She climbed down and meowed loudly. No one answered, but a movement caught her eye. One of her aunts, The Painted Cat, trotted toward a hole in the wall, her ears pinned back and tail low. Small Cat scrambled after her. A gust of smoky wind blew into her face until she squeezed her eyes tight, coughing and gasping. When she could see again her aunt had gone.

  She retreated up the tree and watched houses catch fire. At first, smoke poured from their roofs, and then flames roared up and turn
ed each building into a pillar of fire. Each house was closer than the last. The smoke grew so thick that she could only breathe by pressing her nose into her fur and panting.

  Her house caught fire just as the sky grew dark. Cinders rained on her garden. The grass beside her lake hissed as it burned like angry kittens. The fires crawled up the walls and slipped inside the doors. Smoke gushed through the broken roof. Something collapsed inside the house with a huge crash and the flames shot up, higher even than the top of Small Cat’s tree.

  The air was too hot to breathe. She moved to the opposite side of the tree, and dug her claws into the bark as deep as they would go, and huddled down as small as she could get.

  Fire doesn’t always burn everything in its path. It can leave an area untouched that is surrounded by nothing but smoking ruins. The house burned until it was just blackened beams and ashes. Beside it, Small Cat’s tree got charred but the highest branches stayed safe.

  Small Cat stayed there all night long and by dawn the tall flames in the garden were gone and the smoke didn’t seem so thick. At first she couldn’t get her claws to let go or her muscles to carry her, but at last she managed to climb down.

  Much of the house remained but it was roofless now, hollowed out and charred. Other buildings were no more than piles of smoking black wood. With their leaves burned away the trees looked like skeletons. The pretty bushes were gone. Even the ground smoked in places, too hot to touch.

  There was no sound of any sort: no morning songbirds, no people going about their business on the street. No cats. All she could hear was a small fire still burning in an outbuilding. She rubbed her sticky eyes against her shoulder.