Badass and the Beast: 10

by Shrum, Kory M.

  “What?” She ran the length of the hallway and looked out the window. Her bow, string broken, lay in the corridor. “No!”

  The voice spoke again, and Zoe glared at the wall. “Speak English!” she yelled at the voice, while on the walls, new symbols flowed. “Power critical. Evacuate immediately,” the key said, translating. “I can’t!” She squeezed her eyes shut to block that distraction. “Oh, tent poles!”

  She grabbed her pack and pulled out a handful of pole sections. With trembling hands, she stuck three sections together and twisted the couplings to lock them. Standing, she ran at the door and jabbed the tent pole into the rectangle. The door whooshed open and she threw the pole through before turning for the birds and the pack.

  “Come on, Smoke! Time to go.” She scooped Sand off the floor and grabbed the pack.

  Tchak. Smoke flew to her shoulder just as the voice spoke and the door began sliding shut. “Wait!” She jumped through and stooped to retrieve the tent pole, but she did not slow down. Already another hoop was changing color. “Are they happening in order?” She ran to the purple-hooped circle farthest from any of the bad blue ones. She looked at the circle and waited for the key to speak. Nothing happened.

  “Help me!”

  “Unfamiliar design,” the key said. “Focus on the ring.”

  “Ring, hoop, whatever!” She stared at the hoop and realized that there were symbols embedded in the colored light. She looked at each in turn.

  “That one,” the key said.

  “That one what?”

  “Push it,” the key said.

  Zoe reached up and pushed it. The circle shot away from her, drawing a tube out into white space. The tube twisted and filled with a milky whirlpool that shone with white light. Watching it made her feel dizzy.

  “That’s different.” The floor shuddered again and the whole room creaked.

  “It’s a one-way, emergency transitive,” the key said. “Enter it now.”

  “Where does it go?”

  The key was silent.

  “Great, thanks.” She glanced at Smoke. “Time to go, I think. You ready?”

  Tchak.

  “What you said.”

  Kak.

  Zoe looked down. Sand did not look entirely normal, but at least her beak was closed and her eyes were smaller. “Hey, sweetbeak.”

  Tremors shook the room. More of the calm purple lights turned furious blue, and the overhead lights winked off. Nervous but motivated, Zoe stepped into the whirlpool. For a moment, she seemed to be both in the room and drawn out, drawn elsewhere, and then she was gone, drawn into the milky swirl like a rope through a hole. One by one, the bright blue rings turned black, and then so did the remaining purple ring that embraced the white whirlpool. Everywhere silence and darkness took hold, until the swirl was the sole illumination. Then, a solitary sound, faint and recursive, echoed from the vortex, a distant whisper of Zoe’s joyful voice. “Momma!”

  As moments stretched out and Zoe’s life continued elsewhere, the happy sound of her fulfilled dreams faded, and the whirlpool froze back into a dull white circle, losing its glow and extinguishing forever the very last light of Airzots.

  Baseline Shift

  Selene Morningstar

  For the second time that day, Claire eased her battered body into the shower stall. Her legs quaked, threatening to buckle beneath her as she leaned against the wall, her breath labored. A gush of water shot from the old shower head, a cranky fixture from the 1960s. Everything in The Haight had that 60s flower power feel to it and her apartment was no different, with its boxy windows, low ceilings, and shag carpet.

  Easing the tip of her fingernail beneath the tape stretched high over her hip, she peeled back the bandage. She managed not to graze the wound this time and saved herself from an explosion of pain down her left side. With the last piece of medical tape removed, she exhaled a sigh of relief.

  She caught sight of herself in the opposite mirror, a slender pane fixed to the wall with foam mounting tape. It wasn’t just the gaunt look of her face that startled her. It was either the wide, exhausted eyes with dark rings from sleeplessness, or the way her body appeared thinner, ravaged. The wound itself was worse than when she had first been bitten.

  The jagged ring, set deep into her thigh muscle, eased up onto her buttocks and hip. The circular bite had still pulled parts of her flesh away from the bone. Bruising spread far up her side, to the underside of her breasts, and down her leg almost to the knee. She looked like she’d been slammed into by a truck rather than bitten by a large animal. The bruising was deep and the strange yellow-white pus oozing from the teeth marks reeked of infection. Clearly the antibiotics and topical weren’t working.

  “Shit,” she said and grabbed a wash cloth stacked on a shower shelf.

  When she turned away from the mirror, the water hit the wound. She recoiled, crying out, and her whole leg shook with pain. At a distance, exposing the bite to as little water as possible, she washed herself with slow deliberate strokes. She leaned her weight against the shower wall for support.

  Trying to breathe slow and steady, she worked. Her scrubbing had opened some of the deeper punctures and fresh blood poured down her leg in fat red ribbons.

  She was changing. She knew that.

  The physical changes were the most obvious. It was like, at age twenty-six, she was revisiting puberty. Now, she shaved her legs twice a day. If it was October, jean and boot weather, she could easily ignore the hair. After all, no one would be seeing it, and who did she have to impress? No one, unfortunately.

  But it was May in San Francisco, and that meant more high 80 and 90 degree days, which forced her to diligently remove her newfound fluff.

  She angled the blades under the water and rinsed away the soap and hair. She didn’t understand how it could be so dark. Even the hairs above her knees had darkened. Once fair like her eyebrows and crown, now they grew in coarse, thick strands. She thought the hair on her arms had also thickened, but she wasn’t about to shave that. She knew a few women who had felt the need to shave their arms but the upkeep seemed like a horrific commitment.

  Her beauty ritual had changed since she moved here from Louisiana five years ago. At first, she diligently applied makeup and creams to her face, either at night in her apartment or in the morning as she rode the train to her graphic arts job. Slowly she’d given up the makeup, the obsession with Cosmopolitan beauty tips and all the excessive preening that made her stand out with her city friends. They didn’t fuss over their clothes, their fat, or their faces the way she had in Baton Rouge. Then again, it seemed like all the women she met in San Francisco were a different breed entirely.

  As she bent down with the razor and dragged the blades over the black hairs, she knew it was more than the physical changes that bothered her.

  Her mind wasn’t the same.

  Not in a drastic, discernable way, but she could tell.

  The bite had given her more than an infection. It was as if someone had changed the lighting, and now everything looked different, though recognizable. Maybe she had a fever?

  She lifted the razor up to the light. Then without thought, she pressed her thumb against the razor edge, harder and harder until a fat bead of blood bloomed there.

  “It’s just a body,” she whispered to the girl in the mirror. She looked afraid, but also hopeful. “Just a body.”

  Just after 6:30 P.M., the bell to her apartment rang. The high-pitched cling clang was distinguishable from the passing streetcars, traffic, and beeping buses outside. Laughter and evening light filtered in through the large open windows overlooking the street below. She stopped bouncing a tea bag in hot water and crossed to the intercom beside the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s just me,” Audrey said. “Sorry, I’m early.”

  Claire unlocked her front door and found Audrey standing there.

  The women were the same average height, but their colorings were markedly different. Claire was
fair with a round feminine face and big blue eyes. Audrey was darker with hair the color of crow feathers and equally black eyes. Her jaw was more angular, masculine. When Claire first met her among the precariously stacked books of Bindings and Buns, the used bookstore on Belvedere Street, she had wanted to ask her what her race was. But she didn’t want to seem like one of those small town hicks that came across as obsessed with what kind of non-white a person was.

  Once when they were sunbathing on her balcony, she saw a tribal tattoo on Audrey’s shoulder. It looked like a dog of some kind. A coyote or fox—a wolf, Audrey corrected, when she asked about it.

  This made Claire wonder if Audrey was Native American—but her name, Audrey Aliberti, suggested Greek or Italian instead.

  Audrey’s nostrils flared as she stepped over the carpeted threshold into the apartment.

  “I smell something sweet,” she says. “Chamomile and honey?”

  Claire pushed the cup toward her friend. It was a misshapen thing, a handmade project from a college ceramics course. “Want some?”

  “No, but you can drink it,” she said. “I don’t want to rush you.”

  Claire came around the kitchen island and grabbed the honey bear. “You look nice. Very Parisian chic. I’m going to look like your hillbilly friend in comparison.”

  Audrey smiled and slid onto a barstool at the island counter. “Who said you have to dress up? It’s just us.”

  Us. Six young women going to dinner on a Tuesday night. Claire squeezed the little plastic bear until it whimpered. “Yeah, I guess it shouldn’t matter what I wear.” But it always does, she thought.

  Claire slid onto the stool beside Audrey, elbow to elbow. “You’re staring.”

  “You’re limping.” Audrey’s brow pinched. “Are you hurt?”

  As much as she hated to be fussed over, there was no point in keeping it a secret. “I was bit by a dog or something. I didn’t get a good look at it. It grabbed ahold of me from the side and kind of shook me a little. When I finally turned it had already run away.”

  Audrey pressed a cool hand to Claire’s face. The sudden intimacy surprised her.

  “You’re burning up,” Audrey said.

  “Yeah, I’ve got an infection. They’ve given me antibiotics, but I don’t think they’re working. Antibiotic resistance probably. It’s what I get for eating non-organic cheese.”

  “You should be in bed.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “You’re sick. You should take better care of yourself.”

  But I don’t want to be left behind. All her life, Claire was left behind by the people who were supposed to love her. It was a stupid need, she knew. To feel like she had to go out with her friends every time they got together, her desperation to be included was borderline pathetic.

  “I want to see everyone,” Claire said. “And I really want those mung bean dumplings.”

  Audrey grinned. “I’ll make that happen, if you promise to lay down.”

  “You’ll just sneak out and leave me here!”

  Audrey crossed to the stove and grabbed the kettle off the range. Then she topped off Claire’s mug with steaming water.

  “I wouldn’t do that to you,” Audrey said and returned the kettle to the stovetop. “Now go to bed.”

  Claire fell asleep with her half-full mug cooling beside her on the nightstand. But when she woke up in the dark of her bed, light seeped through her cracked bedroom door. After a couple of slow breaths she realized what had awoken her. Voices from the living room carried down the hall.

  Even though she was alone in her bed, their voices were comforting.

  Audrey with her low, commanding tone.

  Toni’s boisterous laugh.

  Camilla and Joss arguing, as they often did, about the meaning of a movie they saw at the Mothertongue Theater. All of this punctuated by the occasional grunt or snort from Lex, who was no doubt laid out on the couch with a book, peeking out at her friends over the rim. Her wheelchair empty and waiting for her within reach.

  Claire wasn’t with them, but she was close. And it felt good.

  A shadow moved in the hallway and her door was pushed open a crack. Audrey stood there as a featureless shadow in the light.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Better,” Claire said and it was the truth.

  “You want to try to eat something?”

  “God, yes she does,” a shrill voice said behind her. “Eat these dumplings, girl. It’s been war out here trying to keep Toni’s fingers off of them.”

  “I heard that,” Toni said. “Don’t blame me. Everyone saw you poking around in the bag.”

  Audrey came closer, her face coming into view. She stared down at Claire in the bed, mildly amused. It was the closest to happy that Claire ever saw her—when they were all together.

  When she woke again, the apartment was quiet. The plate that had held her dumplings, empty and oil-slicked when she last saw it, was no longer by the bed. Nor the forgotten cup of cold tea. Someone had taken them away and replaced it with a tall glass of water.

  “How do you feel?” Audrey asked.

  Claire turned over to see Audrey, ankles crossed beside her. Her back was against the headboard and a book open in her lap.

  “Better,” she said. “My leg—”

  “I got Toni to help me clean it,” Audrey said, her face half in shadow.

  Claire made a face.

  “I hope that is OK,” Audrey added.

  Claire pulled herself upright and pulled back the covers so that she could inspect the leg. The bandage was fresh and it no longer had the horrible infection smell from before, something like raw meat and rot. Now it smelled almost like her tea.

  “That’s amazing,” Claire said. “What did you do?”

  “It’s an herbal remedy that my grandmother taught me. I know it smells—different.”

  Claire placed a hand by the wound and didn’t cry out in pain. Her leg was cool to the touch.

  “Your grandmother must have some awesome hoodoo,” Claire said. “Thank you.”

  “The smell—”

  “I don’t smell anything,” Claire said, but it was a polite lie. She could smell the herbs, their pungent grassy scent, acrid and earthy. But she also smelled animal. Fur. Like when she slept with the farm dogs at night back in Louisiana.

  It wasn’t a bad scent it was just—

  “What’s wrong?” Audrey asked.

  “Did everyone go home?” Claire asked.

  “Yes,” Audrey said. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you. I think I’ll just go back to sleep, if that’s OK?”

  “Sure.”

  Claire turned onto her side, her back toward her friend. And for a reason she didn’t entirely understand, she began to cry.

  “God, I’m hungry,” said Toni. Her Kidman red curls were flopping around her head in the afternoon breeze rolling in from the marina.

  “You’re always hungry,” said Claire, shielding her eyes from the sunshine.

  The two women watched the white-sailed boats cutting waves out toward the bay, as a homeless man rattling a bush scared tourists into laughter.

  Toni snorted. “Says the girl who’s made us stop to eat twice today.”

  It was true that Claire’s own appetite had picked up. Usually she could go a whole day without eating. Sometimes it was just because she had gotten busy with work. Other times it was because she knew she needed to back off or she’d look like her Aunt Lauraine, barely able to fit all of herself into her front porch rocker or walk more than five steps without orthopedic shoes and a cane.

  “What time are we supposed to meet Camilla and Joss?” Claire asked.

  “They’re broadcasting their latest review of the Abrams movie. They said they should be out of the studio by three.”

  They moved from the rack of tie-dyed shirts advertising Joe’s Crab Shack to a falafel stand a few paces away.

  As Claire and Toni stood beside
the stand eating loaded wraps oozing tzajiki sauce, two women walked past them across the marina’s promenade. They looked like fashion models, tanned and perfectly proportioned. Claire wished she was taller, with a longer torso. Then maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to gain that belly bulge she hated so much.

  Toni followed her line of sight. “They look like Barbie dolls.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Claire said, her mind already hard at work on the inventory of her own flaws-a sharp nose, small mouth, large front teeth, and frizzy hair. Her cheeks were too big and she knew that as she aged, she’d end up like Aunt Lauraine, with jowls that flopped like a coonhound’s. And how could she forget her bowed legs?

  The shorter of the girls squealed as The Bush Man rattled his branches at her. Both girls fell into fits of laughter, clutching their bellies as they darted out of reach.

  Claire turned and saw Toni’s eyes staring down at her. It wasn’t a friendly gaze.

  “Why do you think they’re beautiful?” Toni asked.

  “They’re tall, slender, and perfect.” Claire shrugged. “There isn’t an eyebrow hair out of place.”

  “Looking that closely were you?” Toni laughed. “Your mother should’ve told you looks can be deceiving.”

  Well, she didn’t, Claire thought.

  She stopped listening. The mention of her mother had thrown her back to Aunt Lauraine’s kitchen. The day when she stood there in the peeling doorframe of the old family farm house, a little battered blue suitcase in hand. She was seven and had never even met her round, rough aunt before. She had only images of the New Orleans lounges, streetcars and French Quarter, until she was sent to the farm house outside Baton Rouge. But in the next eleven years, she would come to know that house and her aunt’s weathered face as well as Royal Street.

  Her mother had stood there in a red wrap dress and matching candy apple heels. She was glamourous, and sometimes Claire thought it was impossible that such a gorgeous creature had given birth to her.