Badass and the Beast: 10

by Shrum, Kory M.

  The mermaid stared at it a moment before lifting her mittened hands and frowning up at Sasha.

  “It’s okay, Gramma,” Sasha said. “She has a cold and doesn’t want to spread germs.”

  “Oh.” Gramma pulled her hand back as her smile grew tighter. “I guess there’s a bit of that going around.” She raised an eyebrow at Sasha, who quickly made a show of coughing into the bend of her arm.

  “Yeah. I think I may have caught it too,” she said.

  “Well, Sasha, help your friend to the dining room, and then come help me in the kitchen, please,” Gramma said, just as the timer on the oven went off.

  “I think that went well,” Sasha whispered over Pearl’s shoulder as she wheeled her through the foyer and into the dining room, parking her at an empty spot around a weathered table that seated eight, but was only set for four.

  Even though the table was old, a fresh, snowflake printed runner ran down the center. The gaudy chandelier had been dusted, and the burnt out bulbs replaced. A centerpiece of pumpkins and gourds had been pushed to the unused end of the table, making room for bowls of pasta salad, corn, green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy. Michele joined them, adding a platter of sliced turkey and a basket of dinner rolls.

  “Gramma needs help with the pies,” she said, nudging Sasha away. “Go. I’ll keep Pearl company.”

  Sasha scooped the wrapped fish out of the wheelchair pocket and took it with her. She quietly stowed it in the freezer before following her nose back into the heart of the kitchen, where Gramma muttered to herself as she wedged glass pie dishes down inside a couple of knitted pie cozies. Her curls stuck to her damp brow, and she used the corner of her chicken printed apron to wipe her forehead and chin. When she spotted Sasha, she handed her a stack of dessert plates and an apple cobbler.

  “I don’t like your friend,” she said, fanning herself with an oven mitt. “Sick or not, what kind of girl refuses to shake hands? And she didn’t even say hello.”

  “She’s just nervous. Give her a chance.”

  Gramma picked up the cherry pie and a pitcher of sweet tea before heading into the dining room with Sasha on her heels. Pearl and Michele looked up as they entered, quickly ending their hushed conversation. Sasha blanched as she noticed Pearl’s mittens stacked on top of the coat rack in the foyer, but a wink from Michele tamed her panic.

  Pearl reached out to help Gramma move things around to find a spot for the pie. She kept her fingers close together, as if they’d been glued to each other. Her mannequin hands earned an odd look from Gramma, but also a lopsided smile.

  “Thank you, dear,” Gramma said. She slipped off her apron and sat down at the head of the table. Michele sat to her left, and Sasha and Pearl to her right. “I hope you girls are hungry.”

  Pearl nodded a little too eagerly. “Oh yes. I love cooked food,” she said, reaching for a dinner roll. She frowned at it for a second before taking a timid bite. Her face went ashen, but she smiled forcefully as she chewed, swallowing hard as she set the roll down on her plate.

  Gramma’s wide eyes gave her away, but she held her tense smile. “Well, dig in.”

  As the dishes began moving around the table and Gramma struck up a conversation with Michele about her new beau, Pearl leaned in close to Sasha.

  “What is that thing?” she whispered, poking at the roll.

  “A dinner roll.” Sasha frowned, remembering a paper she had written her freshman year on the negative effects of tourists feeding the reef fish breadcrumbs. “Maybe you should stick with the turkey and mashed potatoes.”

  Pearl’s eyes widened as she cocked an annoyed brow. “Because I totally know what those are,” she hissed, pasting on a polite smile when Gramma turned back to them.

  “Here. Let me help you,” Sasha said with exaggerated cheer. She put a chunk of turkey and a scoop of mashed potatoes on Pearl’s plate.

  Pearl watched Michele use her fork and knife to dissect the meat. She had a hard time imitating her as she struggled to keep her fingers together, but she eventually succeeded in forking a bite into her mouth. “Mmmm. This is delicious.” Gramma beamed and opened her mouth, most likely to thank Pearl for the compliment, but Pearl went on to add, “It’s a million times better than seagull.”

  The table fell quiet for a moment, before Sasha barked out a nervous laugh. “She’s kidding. Right, Pearl?” She elbowed the mermaid, who tried to laugh with her and ended up coughing violently instead.

  Pearl didn’t say much for the rest of dinner, and when Gramma excused herself before dessert had been served, Sasha knew there wouldn’t be another dinner invitation. As she gloomily dished out the pie, a soft knock came at the door. Michele leaned back in her chair, trying to catch a glimpse of their caller through the front window.

  “Were you expecting someone?” she asked.

  “No.” Sasha stood and licked a smear of cherry pie from her finger. She rose up on her toes to squint through the small stretch of stained glass along the top of the door, an act that rarely accomplished anything besides letting salesmen know someone was home. She sighed and opened the door.

  Natalie waited on the front porch, a shiny Christmas tin hugged to her chest. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, thrusting it at Sasha. “I made a ton of fudge and cookies, and I was on my way to my uncle’s, and you’re on the way, and I thought I’d share some with you,” she rambled as her gaze slowly slid over Sasha’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”

  Michele picked up Gramma’s abandoned dessert plate and waved it in the air. “Invite her in, Sasha. You’re letting in cold air, and we have more than enough pie to go around.”

  Sasha couldn’t find her voice, but she stepped back and opened the door wider, silently welcoming Natalie inside. It seemed innocent enough, but when she turned and saw the look on Pearl’s face, a shudder crawled up her spine and shook her shoulders.

  “You,” Pearl hissed. Her face twisted as she pointed at Natalie. “It was you! I saw you!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Sasha touched Pearl’s arm, trying to calm her, but she was having none of it.

  “She was on the ledge. I saw her!” Pearl insisted. “After you fell. I bet she pushed you in.”

  “What?” Natalie’s hand went to her throat. “No. I’d never! I swear, Sasha. I tried to find you. After—but I couldn’t. I looked everywhere.” Tears welled in her eyes and she took a step back toward the door. Pearl looked like she was ready to throw herself out of her wheelchair and flop her way over to Natalie to scratch her eyes out.

  Sasha pushed her arms down, holding her in place. “You have it all wrong, Pearl,” she said softly, her gaze sliding down to the floor in shame. “No one pushed me. I jumped.”

  The room fell quiet, until all Sasha could hear was the rush of her own blood as her pulse thundered against her temples. She sank to the floor and buried her face in Pearl’s lap, bearing the full weight of what she’d done. She’d pushed it to the back of her mind, hoping no one would ever have to know, that she would someday forget. A mermaid was a pretty good distraction. But now she was moving on, and Sasha had to face reality.

  Pearl’s hand rested over hers, and Natalie knelt down beside her, resting a hand on her opposite shoulder. A series of sniffles broke the silence, after which Michele pushed back her chair.

  “And you thought my love life was too dramatic.” She snorted.

  Sasha looked at Pearl, a hidden question in her eyes. When she was satisfied that the mermaid knew and consented, she turned to Natalie. “We need your help again, but first, there’s something you should know about Pearl.”

  It felt like summer. Sasha’s pant legs were rolled up above her knees. Sand squished between her toes with each step she took, rinsing clean as the tide rushed up to greet her. The sun felt warm on her face, and the wind teased her short hair, sculpting it in to careless spikes that Pearl fingered and tucked behind her ears. She carried the mermaid tenderly this time, more like a groom taking his bride over t
he threshold. Only, Sasha and Pearl seemed to be going in reverse.

  They’d driven all morning—Sasha, Pearl, and Natalie—down through Georgia to the edge of the gulf. Natalie’s old Buick fit them all comfortably, but now it reeked of fish, instead of her uncle’s stale cigars. Not much of an improvement. They hit a Long John Silver’s drive-thru around lunch-time, and spent the rest of the trip listening to Pearl’s grumbling. “I hate cooked food.”

  The extra fish and warmth seemed to have cured her for the most part—and she was certainly ready to be back in the sea. It was hard for Sasha and Pearl to admit that they were never going to be a part of each other’s worlds. Their Romeo and Juliet story had been cut short—mostly because they both wanted to live. Sasha hadn’t been so sure before.

  But I am now, she thought, looking across the beach at Natalie, where she sat cross-legged on the hood of her car.

  As Sasha lowered Pearl into the water, she left a gentle kiss along the mermaid’s neck. “Thank you. For everything.”

  Pearl grinned and reached a hand behind Sasha’s head, pulling her in to steal a real kiss before her tail flexed and she launched herself out to sea.

  “Watch out for horny dolphins!” Sasha called over the roar of the surf.

  “Ha!” Pearl called back, raising her middle finger up over her head as she disappeared beneath the waves.

  Sand and Smoke

  Jason T. Graves

  The wind carried the scent of death. They twined, those two fluids—the one, stiff and dry, bore upon its thin back the other, richer and more complex—surely a burden for the wind, but also for Zoe; a burden both cloying and noxious that she struggled not to breathe through. She failed. With blurring vision, she kept her gaze to where the wind fell—towering, sheer cliffs that she had first spied three mornings earlier, then little more than a smudgy line upon the brow of the horizon. Now, they consumed her sight, these cliffs; cliffs that carried upon their shoulders hills; hills which provided legs and footstool to the vast and bulky mountains overtop them. Snow was there, gleaming white as sun-bleached teeth. The teeth of the world.

  Zoe was, if anything, pragmatic. Death drew life. And the very beasts that fed on carrion might well stave off her own eminent starvation by a day or even a week, so she made for the stench rather than avoid it. Such were the realities of life in a desert. The desert, she thought and grimaced. The spreading desert. Sand and dust and mounts of stone, suffused in cold, drear suffering. Home.

  The smells saturated the air and the hollow spaces of her face despite the cloth sachet of sage weed pressed across her nose and mouth. Nearly overhead now, the great, cinereous vultures rode the rising air. If they’re up there, something worse must be on the carcass. The depth of the odors suggested at least three days had passed since life had given up on the unfortunate creature. Plenty of time to call in the worst from the wastes.

  Overhead, the vultures shifted, dropping lower to inspect the new arrival. Twisting on Zoe’s shoulders, her two companions, Sand and Smoke, ruffled their feathers. “Shh. Not yet.”

  In spite of her words, talons squeezed skin long accustomed to the pinch and pressure, so long present that it was now barely felt. Sand bunched herself, wings quivering, ready to leap, while Smoke swiveled his head, his wise eyes turned to sky and ground, surveilling the world for danger.

  Tchak, he voiced quietly.

  “I know, sweetbeak,” Zoe whispered back. “It stinks.” Holding close to caution, she crept up to the crest of the rise before her, dropping to a crouch and a crawl, as the land beyond revealed itself in advancing slices, until she could see all.

  The carcass, huge beyond anything in her experience, lay in the course of a dead river. As the river died, so died the beast, she thought. How poetic. But, whereas the river had experienced a clean death, phoenix-like in puffing away, the giant creature had not. Instead, it left a gray corpse pocked with rusty red stains and riddled with a thousand tunnels, large and small. Upon its broad flanks and sides crouched tawny sand leopards, their blunt muzzles eagerly partaking of the bloated bounty beneath their paws.

  “What is that thing? It’s enormous.”

  She thought of all the beasts Momma and Papa had told her about, before they had gone away, and the word elephant was the one that floated in her mind. Gray and huge, a mountain moving, and a nose like a hose, her mother had said. Zoe blinked. Sometimes, she felt as if so few of her memories of Momma remained—an image of her face, an echo of her laughter, and a remembrance of fierce, brown arms that had wrapped and squeezed her little-girl self until she had giggled—these were the faint scraps she clung to, and yet, at other times, with provocation, entire events and whole conversations would tumble forth. As with much in Zoe’s life, it made little sense.

  A shadow passed over her, making the birds shiver. She blinked again, traversing the distance from the then to the now, and glanced up. The black vortex was relocating, finding a new epicenter. Here I lay, birds upon me. Of course I look like fresh meat to the carrion kings so recently deposed of their rotting estate. She twitched her left shoulder. “Go,” she whispered.

  Kak! Kak, kak, kak! Sand called and was away, her wings churning the air as she rose to challenge the vultures. Not to be left out, Smoke hopped the short distance to Zoe’s head and perched there, watching the trio of sand leopards, including the one that was watching them.

  Tchak!

  “I know. I see it,” she said and rose slightly, watching the feline. She hated hunting cats. They were dangerous and they tasted funny, but she had not eaten in three days, so her concerns were not even remotely debatable; if not the cat, then starvation. End of discussion.

  “You curious now?” she whispered to the lean cat. It stood and lifted its head, chasing scents in the air. “I’m downwind, stupid.” Zoe pushed herself up a little higher, her black curls catching the breeze like pennants. “Use your eyes.”

  Sensing the movement, the cat leapt down from the bloated behemoth and padded across the dead river’s cracked trace. On the rise, Zoe grimaced and her heart beat in tempo with Sand’s speckled wings. She hated being stalked.

  The leopard loped up the rise, the other cats too busy with their meal to be bothered with such a thing as curiosity. Once she was sure of the cat’s intentions, Zoe slid back down the hill, shucked her pack, and untied her bow, her fingers tracing the knots backwards with practiced ease. The smooth wood took to her hand as other fingers ran the string from cleat to cleat, feeling for fraying, wiping away dust, and then to the quiver and the precious shafts of reed. She drew one out, its feathering the speckle of Sand’s plumage, its head ruby chert. Her father had told her that word as he made all of the arrows. There used to be more, but they had been lost over time, like so much in her life.

  Nocking the arrow, she pushed the bow out, just as Papa had shown her. Settling her feet, she raised the arrow head and waited, but only for a second. On the ridge, a ninety-pound tempest of death appeared, turned a negligent gaze to Zoe, surveyed her, and found her to be a negligible threat. It bounded off the rise, and Zoe let fly the arrow. The cat, unaware of the danger and consumed by its own certainty of fresh meat, came on.

  Chert, reed, and feathers, spinning clockwise in a land with no clocks, took the cat in the upper chest, the head cutting a spiraling hole through muscle and lung, stopping at the fierce heart. The leopard, sensing something abnormal, chuffed but kept coming. Zoe squatted, reaching for another arrow, but the time escaped and the tempest bore down, a storm that sprawled her across the sand. Bow flown and father’s knife beneath her, she wrestled with her death—feeling the claws and seeing the mouth. Red-stained teeth lunging for her vulnerable throat, but the cat stalled and coughed. Zoe felt the thin shaft of cane straining against her chest—the arrow, its chert head cutting into the fierce heart, kept the cat from biting her. Her hands grasped dusty fur, and she pulled, paradoxically, flinching as the nock dug into her skin and the teeth came ever closer, but the cat shuddered, lids droo
ping, before it dropped to the side, to the ground, and batted at the shaft. It snarled and coughed and died.

  Zoe lay panting. Too close.

  Tchak.

  Wind and wings buffeted her. Delicate feet pranced where clawed pads had inflicted harm only seconds before. “Smoke.” The word emerged a rasping croak. “Danger?”

  Buffeted once again, the weight disappeared. She gulped air and ran deft but trembling fingers over herself, assessing the wounds. There were many, but no bites. Need to get up. She rolled to her side, coming face-to-face with the cat. Twin droplets of golden fire dulled as she watched, its eyes glazing in the dry chill of the mountain’s breath.

  “Sorry,” Zoe whispered. “You or me.”

  Pushing up, she stood, and winced from the cuts. She gathered her possessions, taking the time to tie the bow in place. If danger threatened, Sand and Smoke would tell her. Finally, she hoisted the cat over her shoulders and staggered down the slope.

  The nearest mount, a spire of rock jutting from the sand as if a giant bone had dropped from the sky, had proven itself to be neither terrible nor terribly hospitable. The largest cave was ten yards up a challenging climb, and she hoisted herself along from each handhold to the next, a tail of rough rope linking her to the cat. Above her, Sand circled the spire, watching for predators and menacing the pair of vultures that had broken from the others and followed the grim parade. Inside the cave, Smoke would be looking and hopping, flushing out any snakes or other unsavories. Beads of precious liquid ran beneath her clothes, whether blood or sweat she would not know until she could undress in the safety of the cave.

  Kak, kak!

  The broken stone crumbled away in flakes and fissures before her nose as she paused to breathe. What now? Glancing to heaven, salt and dust stinging her eyes, she watched Sand beat the air toward the empty wash. Following the merlin with her gaze, she flinched as two dusky tan smudges crawled up into her sight. Why? Why couldn’t you give me more time? Wiping the wet from her brow, she scored her sleeve with darkness and reached for the next handhold.