The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  So, I’d thought, digging out my wallet and making for the vendor, who was selling fish burgers out of a big white catering van. I’m a bear.

  I got strong too—scarily strong—over the weeks that followed. It made it easy to wrangle Vitaly’s concrete monuments onto and off of the dolly I carried in my truck.

  The smell thing I was fine with; the strength too. But bears live to pack on the fat in the summer and snooze through the winter. What was Aidan thinking when he said we should move to Alberta? The cold and dark would slow his sap, and I’d be under the covers, dreaming and belching fish. We’d be helpless; anyone might come for us.

  One of the few people I did repeat deliveries to was a woman who ran a funk and antique store in Osoyoos—she seemed to like having one concrete albatross in stock at any given time. I supposed she must have sold them; she reordered, maybe one every two to three weeks. She’s the one who told me that technically the South Okanagan wasn’t a desert—it got an inch or two too much rain, each year.

  My swamp man said ecosystems didn’t have tidy boundaries: they blurred. Wine country lacked the lush wet of Vancouver—no ferns, no squash of cedar mulch underfoot, no Emily Carr landscape with its filtered green light and heavy blankets of blue spruce vegetation. The desert landscape verged on Georgia O’Keeffe: sagebrush, trembling aspen, and ponderosa pine, the latter dying by the thousands as an infestation of pine beetles—not magical, a disaster predating the current crisis, but still going strong—gnawed its way through the province.

  But animals weren’t ruled by neat climate-zone borders on human maps. Maybe the coast didn’t have rattlesnakes or praying mantises or wild mountain sheep, but the sky was all one piece, and within it the osprey hunted from the sea to the vineyards and beyond. Under it, salmon made the long voyage inland from the ocean every year. Honeybees and bumblebees spread pollen like messages, from plant to plant and province to province, crossing the border without regard for our rules, our guards, and our guns.

  So we got found, of course; it had only ever been a matter of time. But it wasn’t the police who came for Aidan.

  In the hollow on the acreage where our rented trailer was parked, it started to rain, water pounding like a thousand ball bearings on the roof one night when we were screwing. The storm continued through to the dawn. The locals called it a cloudburst at first, welcoming the break from the thirty-five degree heat. But then it went on, growing from anomaly to nuisance to, ominously, a threat to the harvest. People stared at the skies, muttering about grapes and hang time and mudslides.

  Even then, we didn’t realize what it meant. As lightning pounded and crashed overhead, Aidan went to the bakery in rubber boots and a slicker, and I thought nothing had changed but the weather.

  Vitaly called and I drove to his workshop, crawling the highway at thirty miles an hour, headlights on, windshield wipers squeaking in vain. He was waiting under an umbrella, beside a concrete rendering of a scantily clad nymph with a big bird in her arms.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “Leda and the swan, I assume?” The bird looked less like it was nuzzling her affectionately and more like it might be about to bite her ear off.

  “Met a guy online who’s using the magical outbreak as an excuse to develop a Greek temple. Says the old gods are coming back to get us.”

  I laughed. Then I thought: Oh, shit, what if they are?

  Vitaly thrust a bigger-than-usual wedge of paper at me. “Shipping forms.”

  I scanned them. “In the States?”

  He shrugged. “You said you had ID. Is it a problem?”

  “I can get through the border,” I said. The papers were import documents, all legitimate enough, though Vitaly’d filled the forms out by hand with green ink. There was space on the grid for more entries.

  “So?”

  I wrapped the papers in plastic, carefully, to keep out the water. “Tell me one thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It is actually statues I’ve been delivering all this time? They aren’t full of pot?”

  He howled laughter into the downpour. “I’m a net consumer, Calla—not a producer. I’d smoke myself silly in a week if I was dealing. ’Sides, I’m too old for adventures in cross-border smuggling. You won’t get arrested, I swear.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not on my account, anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said again. “Can you pay me in U.S. this time? So I have money to buy…whatever, while I’m there?”

  He nodded and fished in the unlocked cupboard in his garage for a few bills. “So we’re good?”

  “We’re great.” I was so excited I’d almost broken a sweat.

  I drove to the nearest greasy spoon, bought four double burgers, ate them one after another as I made for home. I found the trailer in a growing puddle, the sodden sagebrush and prickly pear of our yard looking like it was fixing to gasp and drown. A flock of maybe seventy Canada geese and their newly fledged young were waiting, staring intensely at the trailer. They hissed at me as I passed.

  “He’s mine,” I told them. “You can’t have him.”

  Aidan was inside with the heat on and the stove running all four burners, watching the birds watch him.

  “At least it’s not the police,” he said weakly.

  I didn’t point out that the bog was bigger than the cops. “I say this qualifies as not getting away with it anymore.”

  “Yeah. So…Alberta?”

  I shook off the water, drying my hands over the burners. “I want to go to the States, Clyde.”

  “You’ll get snagged trying to save me,” he said. “I’m not worth it.”

  “You are precious like rubies,” I said. “But it’s not just about saving you. I want to go south. I’ve seen the Prairies, and winter frightens me.”

  “You don’t know that you’ll hibernate,” he said.

  “If we go toward the cold, I will. I know it.”

  “So we exploit that. Find somewhere to hole up for the winter, ride out the weather in a shared coma.” He cupped my face in his hands. “You know I love to sleep with you.”

  “That sounds like a great way to wake up in custody,” I said. “Aidan, even if we don’t get grabbed, even if the world doesn’t end before spring, there’s always an end. That same ticking clock, am I right?”

  His pale lips were set, a mulish expression.

  “I want time with you. I don’t want to spend it unconscious in some moldy rented basement. I want to see adobe houses and a Civil War battlefield or the Bonneville Salt Flats. Even the friggin’ Alamo would do.”

  “I want to give you that, Calla. I love you; I want to give you whatever you want.” He couldn’t quite hold his temper. “But I have no goddamned passport, and the border ain’t some joke.”

  “You don’t have to give me squat.” I shut off the burners. “I’ve worked out a way to get it all by myself. All you have to do is say okay.”

  Without the heat, Aidan cooled off quickly—the whole trailer did. The flesh tones leached from his body and his joints stiffened.

  Cold bit into me too. Oh, I’d hibernate, all right. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but I was yawning as I brought the truck up to the camper door and stretched the waterproof tarp tight over the back. I pulled out a crate I’d filched from Vitaly (passing up the temptation of his cupboard full of cash) and made Aidan a cozy nest of inert, safe Styrofoam peas. As it got colder and colder, I put on a sweatshirt, then a sweater. My swamp man was moving slowly, as if he’d been drugged. I chugged water; the worse I needed to pee, the less I wanted to sleep.

  He sat at the tiny dining table with that look on his face; he was scared.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I promised. “We’re gonna get away with it, Bonnie.”

  “You’re Bonnie,” he said. “I’m Clyde.”

  I kissed him, keeping a space between our bodies, withholding my body heat. “Look,” I said, showing him Vitaly’s import papers. “Item: statue. Description: Leda and
the swan. Value: nine hundred dollars U.S. Here’s his tax number and exporter permit and here—”

  “…is a blank line.” He nodded.

  “See? We aren’t gonna bother trying to fake you a passport.”

  “I’m goods,” he said, bitterly amused. “How much am I worth?”

  “More than nine hundred,” I said.

  “Nine hundred and one?”

  “We don’t want to look cute. Let’s put…Item: statue. Value: nine-fifty.”

  “What do we say for a description?”

  “Classic man?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re crossing the border with your pants off. How’s that for bold?”

  “If they do catch us, it’ll save ’em time when they strip search me.”

  “They’re not catching us. How about: Adam in the garden?”

  “Because I’m so innocent?” His words came out syrupy; he was getting colder.

  “Do we have to capture the essence of your being on the forged smuggling form?”

  That got him; he laughed. “We should get me a wine barrel and suspenders.”

  “Holy shit. My dad totally had one of those statuettes in his office! Yours too?”

  “My uncle. It was gross. The big barrel came off, and—”

  “Sproing. There was a smaller wine cask on a spring attached to his crotch. So very hilarious.”

  “Maybe the world is ending, but at least the seventies ended first.” He got to his feet, stretched, and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Write Michael—it’s my middle name.”

  With that he lay down in the crate and I sat beside him, my hand on his, until he lost consciousness, until he glazed and froze. When he was completely immobile, I took his glasses off and kissed his lips, one last time. Then I packed his limbs ’round with garbage bags, as a last defense against the rain, and nailed down the lid of the crate before opening the camper door.

  The bog had other ideas about my grand getaway plan.

  The swamp hadn’t been content to rain down a few birds with a guilt-trip. The truck and trailer had sunk farther within the growing puddle, and the birds were doing what they could to help, sitting atop the tarp and the roof of the cab.

  “Heeetchchch…” Dozens of goose beaks, shoe-black, opened to hiss, revealing bubblegum-colored tongues. They smelled of fresh meat and the promise of a long winter nap.

  It wasn’t just birds. Six squirrels were jumping up and down on the roof of the truck, and a row of small brown bats dangled on the tailpipe. The sight of a patrolling skunk gave me pause—getting sprayed would get me noticed at the border. A blacktail deer was standing in front of the truck, giving me the damn doe eyes. The coyote dug methodically at the sand by my front tires.

  “Seriously?” I said. “You’re all staging a sit-in?”

  They’d learned this from him, I suspected—Aidan had said he’d been arrested in some logging protests, way back when he was an idealistic student.

  “You don’t need his brain back,” I told them. “You learned all you could. You’re doing fine without him.”

  The animals stood firm, letting a second defiant hiss from the spokesgeese make the swamp’s position clear.

  Go on, they seemed to be saying. Throw him in the back, see if you can pull out of the mire and run over that doe before we tear off the tarp and get a few salmonberry runners into Aidan’s leg.

  It damn well loves him too, I thought.

  I had one of those hot, three-year-old tantrumy bursts of emotion. Dammit, I want what I want, give me what I want. I’ve lost so much, you’re not stealing him away…And it was the big rage, all the long-contained anger and fear in my half-bear heart, spilling out as I drew my first full lungful of air since the fire, pulled it deep into my lungs without the faintest hint of a cough or stabbing cramp, pulled it in and let out a frustrated…

  …Well, if I’d meant it to be anything at all, I suppose it would have been something like: “Aarrrgh!”

  What came out was a sustained, ursine bellow. Here I was, crossed by a bunch of damned geese and rodents. I’d lost my job, my friends, my faith in an orderly world where you worked hard and didn’t complain and somehow were taken care of. My humanity itself was in question.

  I’d found one thing, one, that more than paid for it and I wasn’t going to lose True Fucking Love to a rain cloud and a bunch of edible, honking birds.

  The sound of all that anger, roaring out of me, vibrated my eyeballs. It smacked in to the geese like a physical blow—their little beaks clicked shut, and they recoiled in sync. The coyote shot away from the tire and took up a stance ten feet away, coiled to spring farther if I came out swinging. The skunk vanished into the brush with a pungent fart. The squirrels jumping on the truck froze in midbounce with “Holy shit!” expressions on their faces.

  “He’s. Not. Yours,” I shouted, with the last of my breath.

  The echo of my voice was coming back at me from across the lake. My throat was raw, and I was hungry, so hungry. The burgers I’d eaten were all burned up. I thought about seizing one of the geese and making a violent sashimi example of it.

  Instead I reached back inside the camper, grabbed my crate, and slid Aidan under the sagging tarp, beside Vitaly’s statue of Leda. I bellowed again as I leapt into the six-inch-deep mud beside the truck. The flock burst upward, blasting the air with a hundred wings and leaving behind a slime of half-digested grass plugs. I kicked water at the coyote and it bounced back another five feet, growling.

  I stomped to the front of the truck and grabbed the slippery, rain-soaked deer by its unresisting torso.

  “Go on, start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I dare you,” I said. I’d never been good at sustaining anger; I was starting to think this was funny, and that was bad, because I hadn’t won yet.

  Still, I couldn’t wait to tell Aidan about all this.

  I dragged it all the way into the bush and wrangled it so we were nose to nose. “You’re fast, Bambi’s mom,” I said. “You can beat me back to the truck. But if we have to do this twice I am duct-taping your neck to this pine tree here, and you can strangle yourself trying to get loose.”

  With that, I stomped back to the truck, engaged the four-wheel drive, and drove myself out of the pocket swamp, spraying water as I fishtailed onto the desert highway.

  The rainstorm followed me for sixty miles, past the border—where an indifferent blond Amazon in uniform squinted at the customs paperwork and my passport for all of a nanosecond before waving me through. It chased me past the delivery address, where I left the first statue in the shelter of a half-built replica of a Greek temple whose columns were made of cinder blocks. It poured buckets on me and on the state wilderness area I was fleeing through, sluicing down the windows, gushing along the narrow, twisty roads, overflowing the banks of the shallow ditches. The wind gusted so hard that I could feel the truck rocking on the switchbacks.

  I cranked the stereo, found West Side Story, sang along loudly—“I like to be in America, okay by me in uhMAAAREica”—fought to stay on the road, and tried not to think about how hungry I was.

  Then I crested a hill and before me and below, through a break in the trees, I saw a little town that had been fixed up so the storefronts all looked like something from a Wild West movie: hitching posts, old-fashioned saloon doors, the whole nine. It was maybe a mile ahead, and there the sun spilled on to the road like gold, a clear demarcation between danger and safety, the nice clean line Aidan said didn’t exist.

  Magic, I thought, driving out of the deluge and into summer heat. The hood of the truck steamed.

  Warmth was good—it revived me—but I was almost faint with hunger. I checked myself in the mirror, finding no overt signs of bear. I did look a little desperate, capable of eating the first thing I saw; every random smell of things edible, fresh or rotten, even the trash bins, was driving me to tears. I hit a gas station with a car wash and bought a box of Twinkies. Golden sponge cake and crap cream
filling; bad nutrition. I knew I should have meat—eggs, fish, beef—but the box had practically screamed at me when I went inside. Sometimes my inner bear, she liked her junk food.

  I sat on the back of the truck and unwrapped the first, shoving it deep into my mouth, bracing for disappointment. But the sugar sent a primal surge of pleasure through my body; it was as good as my six-year-old self remembered. It made everything better. I moaned, and the sound was deep and guttural and inhuman.

  Nobody heard.

  The second one broke in my hand, smearing filling everywhere. I managed not to lick it off. The burns on my hands had darkened to brown, I saw, and the damaged flesh of my palms looked a bit like the pads of animal feet.

  One problem at a time, I thought, hosing the thousand plugs of sodden goose shit off my tarp. We were through the border. That was enough for now.

  In the coffin-shaped crate beside me, something stirred.

  I threw one more Twinkie back, went into the station, peed, and then used Vitaly’s cash to buy all their buffalo jerky and a quart of Coke. Protein and caffeine, brunch of champions. After a second’s thought, I bought a fishing rod too, a license and a can of worms.

  Then I went out, patted the crate, and jingled my keys. “Hold on a little longer,” I said, sotto voce. “Gotta find somewhere discreet to unbox you.”

  The road was narrow and had no passing lanes, but within half an hour I found a turnout for a campground and drove in, paying for a parking spot by a high, burbling stream under the pines.

  “Okay! Either we’re clear or we’re not.” The sky was cloudless and hot. I parked in a patch of sun, opened the crate, and shoved Aidan, as gracefully as I could, so he was lying across the driver’s seat and the passenger side. He was stiff as bone; he might have been dead.

  I wasn’t worried.

  I chugged all of the Coke and got to work on the jerky as I fumbled the fishing pole together, trying to work out, from the instructions, how to string the line. I could smell fish in the stream, and part of me figured it’d be easier to stand in the water and grab at them with my hands. Who knew if the pole was even right for river fishing?