“People will see you for sure.”
“What’s so bad if they do see us?”
“Quill!”
“We’re just other human beings.”
“Well, that’s the problem.”
“Aren’t we?”
“You’ve been protected from the real people.”
“I’m real.”
“Look at yourself. You’re them. You may be a being but you’re not a human being.”
“I am so.”
“You belong in the zoo.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“There’s no zoo in that little town anyway. They’re only in big towns.”
“That doesn’t look little to me.”
“Believe me, it is.”
I suppose he’s right. He usually is.
“Well, I won’t go home. Not when I’m so close to seeing new things.”
“You won’t get far with that baby on your back.”
“Lots of people must have babies down there.”
“Not one like that.”
“I’m not going to argue, I’m just not going to go home until I see this town.”
“Go ahead, then, but it’s the end of all of us. Though…I’m tired of it, too. Let’s end it. Or I’ll tell you what, go on down. Wear my hat pulled low and see if you can get away with it. And they might have a little zoo with maybe four or five animals in some park or other, but don’t go into town till it’s dark. I’ll keep the baby. You’ll never get away with it with him.”
“All right, if the baby doesn’t mind.”
I do want to see that town. I start right away. It’ll be getting dark by the time I get there.
Pretty soon the trees get fewer and there’s fields of stuff growing. I begin to see cows and horses. I’ve only seen those in books. I stop at the edge of one of the fields and two horses come over to me as if to say hello. At first I think they might bite, but there’s the fence between us and you can tell they’re friendly right away. They lean to be touched and I touch them.
Right after, there begins to be houses. All nicer even than Mother’s. Some with one floor on top of another. I know all about that. I’ve seen pictures. There’s some with different colors and bobbles hanging all over them. I never knew a house could be so pretty. I’m already glad I came.
When I get to the edge of town it’s pretty dark. I pull my hat down even lower and walk on. The people are all Tom’s kind of people just like he said. Nobody is as beautiful as my father. There aren’t any feathers at all.
I come to a little park with swings and slides. I’ve seen pictures of those. There’s nobody there. I guess it’s too late for young ones to be out. I try all the things. I can’t believe I’m learning so much in such a hurry. These last few days it’s been one new thing after another.
There’s streetlights. You don’t need those lights Haze has. I come to a big street with stores all along it. Most of them closed. Some have prices in the windows. Money! I hadn’t thought of that.
I walk all the way down the main street. It must be a mile long. Shops all along the way. I don’t care what Tom says, it’s a big town to me. I look in the store windows. The clothes look different from the ones Mother makes. And shoes…so fancy and slick, some with funny little heels. There’s a store full of beautiful shiny pots and pans never used, cups and plates neither tin nor wood nor clay.
There’s a bigger park at the other end of town. It even has a swimming pool. All blue and smells funny. I’m thirsty but I don’t drink there. There’s a river running through the park and that’s where I drink. There’s no zoo that I can find. I was so hoping there’d be one. I want to see monkeys and tigers and elephants. I wonder how far a bigger town is. If I knew which direction to go in, I might head for that town.
I see people on the porch of an eating place eating with forks. I see two women clacking along in high-heeled sandals. I see cars and trucks. All this even though you’d think people would be in bed. I get honked at. I jump away and quack back.
Then Haze is here. He must have been following me all this time. Even though my hat is pulled down low, he knows it’s me.
I say, “Don’t tell,” and he says he won’t. I don’t know if I should believe him or not, but it looks as if he won’t tell right now, anyway.
“You look exhausted. Are you hungry? Come home with me.”
Haze’s house is like I’ve never seen before. There’s rugs and a couch. There’s even a little room that’s just for me, but I don’t want it. I’ve never slept by myself before and I’m scared to. Haze makes me up a mattress on the floor next to him. The food is odd, too. I don’t know what it is but I eat it anyway. Except for bugs, Haze ate what we ate. That was like Mother, too. She hated for us to eat bugs. There’s also a little room for an outhouse that’s not even out. I learn to flush. I learn to turn on the water, cold and hot.
But next morning breakfast is just like at home, oatmeal. I ask Haze, “What are you going to do about us? You killed my father. You might do anything.”
“You were yelling, Help. Your father was trying to take you back. I thought I was helping. I didn’t know it was your father. But I don’t know. What should I do?”
“I don’t know either.”
“You’re going to be discovered no matter what I do. Might as well be now as later. Might as well be me as somebody out to make a buck.”
“How come we’ve not been discovered all this time?”
“Your mother picked a good hiding place.”
“Tom said it was the end of all of us. Tom said our lives depend on you.”
“I won’t let anybody hurt you.”
“You have drawings of everything.”
“You’re scientifically important. You’re all important. They’ll need to study you.”
You wouldn’t think so many things could happen so fast. It all comes about in a couple of days. Even the destruction of the fathers, which they did to themselves. I’m glad the regular human beings didn’t do it. I don’t know what I would have thought if they had.
The fathers knew what would happen. They know about human beings. When Haze and the others…the scientists and the army and police get out to the ship, it’s destroyed. The nest and eggs and all the creatures with it. There’s nothing left of them but us.
Mother must have known. Even if we didn’t hear the blast down in town, she’s so much closer she must have heard and known. They found her body washed down our Silver river. She had made us all moccasins and lined them up along the table, all exactly the right size. She loved us but she needed for things to stay the same.
Now she’ll never find out how we got taken into this school. A farm kind of school off in the middle of nowhere, with all kinds of animals. But also a scientific school with lots of geology and biology, so someday I can be a scientist in a zoo. I’ll probably have to be in the zoo myself. I know that. Even now people keep coming to take blood and study us. I don’t mind. I’m studying myself myself and them, too.
Haze took all our gold, but he’s using it for us. He’s paying for the school.
He says, “The fathers were scared of us.” When he says “us,” he means the human beings. He says, “And rightly so. They thought we wouldn’t accept them and we wouldn’t. They knew their nests and eggs were easy to destroy. But having living dinosaurs…Feathered…Think of the experiments…And studying…them and their ship…”
And he keeps saying, “Just think…think, there’s been contact with aliens all these years and nobody knew it.”
I don’t feel like an alien. I think I belong here just as much as anybody.
CAROL EMSHWILLERis the author of many acclaimed novels and story collections, including Carmen Dog, The Start of the End of It All (winner of the World Fantasy Award), I Live with You, The Mount (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and a Nebula Award Finalist), and Mister Boots. She divides her time between homes in New York City and California.
Her Web site is www.sfwa.
org/members/emshwiller.
AUTHOR ’S NOTE
Quill’s strong voice made the tone—the surface of the story—interesting to me, so it was fun writing it. It was because of her voice that I went on with the story.
I usually don’t write such a science fiction-y story, but the idea of beautiful, feathered dinosaurs pleased me. That is, after I got to them. I didn’t know there were going to be dinosaurs in the story until I got to their cache of eggs. Then I had to go back and make the earlier parts match.
I always write that way: give myself hints of a mystery and then have to solve it after I’ve set it up. That means there’s almost always an OH MY GOD NOW WHAT’LL I DO place in every story. I find my plots come out better when I don’t know where I’m going.
Francesca Lia Block
BLOOD ROSES
Every day, Lucy and Rosie searched for the blood roses in their canyon. They found eucalyptus and poison oak, evening primrose and oleander, but never the glow-in-the-dark red, smoke-scented flowers with sharp thorns that traced poetry onto your flesh.
“You only see them if you die,” Lucy said, but Rosie just smiled so that the small row of pearls in her mouth showed.
Still, the hairs stood up on both their arms that evening as they sat watching the sunset from their secret grotto in the heart of the canyon. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and decaying leaves. The sky was streaked with smog and you could hear the sound of cars and one siren, but that world felt very far away.
Here, the girls turned dollsize, wove nests out of twigs to sleep in the eucalyptus branches, collected morning dew in leaves and dined on dark purple berries that stained their mouths and hands.
“We’d better get home,” Lucy said, brushing the dirt off her jeans.
They would have stayed here all night in spite of the dangers—snakes, coyote, rapists, goblins. It was better than the apartment made of tears where their mother had taken them when she left their father.
Their mother said their father was an alcoholic and a sex addict, but all Lucy remembered was the sandpaper roughness of his chin, like the father in her baby book Pat the Bunny, when he hugged her and Rosie in his arms at the same time. He had hair of black feathers and his eyes were green semiprecious stones.
Lucy and Rosie loved Emerson Solo because like their father he was beautiful, dangerous and unattainable. Especially now. Emerson Solo, twenty-seven, had stabbed himself to death in the heart last month.
You really have to want to die to be successful at that, their mother said before she confiscated all their Solo albums and posters. Lucy understood why she’d done it. But still she wanted to look at his face and hear his voice again. For some reason he comforted her, even now. Was it because he had escaped?
Lucy and Rosie were in the record store looking through the Emerson Solo discs. There was the one with the black bird on the cover called For Sorrow and the one called The White Room. There was a rumor that the white room was supposed to be death. The store was all out of Collected with the photo of Emerson Solo holding a bouquet of wildflowers with their dirty roots dragging down out of his hands.
A man was standing across the aisle from them, and when Lucy looked up he smiled. He was young and handsome with fair hair, a strong chin.
“You like him?” he asked.
Rosie said, “Oh, yes! Our mom threw out all his CDs. We just come and look at him.”
The man smiled. The light was hitting his thick glasses in such a way that Lucy couldn’t see his eyes. Dust motes sizzled in a beam of sunlight from the window. Some music was playing, loud and anxious-sounding. Lucy didn’t recognize it.
“My uncle’s a photographer. He has some photos he took of him a week before he killed himself.”
Lucy felt her sinuses prickling with tears the way they did when she told Rosie scary stories. Her mouth felt dry.
“You can come see if you want,” he said. He handed Lucy a card.
She put it in her pocket and crumpled it up there, so he couldn’t see.
One of Emerson Solo’s CDs was called Imago. The title song was about a phantom limb.
She wondered if when you died it was like that. If you still believed your body was there and you couldn’t quite accept that it was gone. Or if someone you loved died, someone who you were really close to, would they be like a phantom limb, still attached to you? Sometimes Rosie was like another of Lucy’s limbs.
Rosie was the one who went—not Lucy. Lucy was aware enough of her own desire to escape, to let herself succumb to it. But Rosie still believed she was just looking for ways to be happier.
When Lucy got home from school and saw her sister’s note, she started to run. She ran out the door of thick, gray glass, down the cul-de-sac, across the big, busy street, against the light, dodging cars. She ran into the canyon. There was the place where she and Rosie had seen a rattlesnake blocking their path, the turn in the road where they had seen the baby coyote, the grotto by the creek where the old tire swing used to be, where the high-school kids went to smoke pot and drink beer. There was the rock garden that had been made by aliens from outer space and the big tree where Lucy had seen two of them entwined in the branches early one Sunday morning. Lucy skidded down a slope causing an avalanche of pebbles. She took the fire road back down to the steep, quiet street. She got to the house just as Rosie knocked on the tall, narrow door.
Rosie was wearing a pink knit cap, a white frilly party dress that was too small, too-short jeans, ruby slippers, mismatched ankle socks—one purple, one green, and a blue rhinestone pin in the shape of a large butterfly. No wonder people teased her at school, Lucy thought. She wanted to put her arms around Rosie, grab her hand, and run, but it was too late to leave because the man opened the door right away as if he had been waiting for them all that time.
He didn’t ask them in but stood staring at them and twisting his mouth like he wanted to say something. But then another man was standing at the top of the steep staircase. The girls couldn’t see his face. He was whited out with light.
Lucy knew two things. She knew that she and Rosie were going to go inside the house. She knew, too (when she saw it in a small alcove as she walked up the stairs) that she would take the screwdriver and put it in the pocket of her gray sweatshirt.
The walls were covered with plastic. So was all the furniture. Plastic was stretched taut across the floor. The walls were high, blond wood. There were skylights between the ceiling beams. Fuzzy afternoon sun shone down onto the plastic skins.
There was a long table. The older man stood at one end, watching. It was still hard to see what he looked like. The young man offered the girls pomegranate juice in small opalescent glasses. Lucy put her hand on Rosie’s arm, but her sister drank hers anyway. Then Rosie walked out of the room.
“Rosie,” Lucy whispered.
The young man said, “Do you know there’s this dream that Jeffrey Dahmer had? He dreamed he was in this big, fancy hotel lobby with all these beautiful people wearing evening dresses and tuxedos. They were all pounding on the marble floor and screaming. But he was just standing there, not moving, not saying anything. He had on a leather jacket. It was like his skin.”
Lucy felt for the screwdriver in her pocket. “I’m going to get my sister,” she said.
But Rosie was back now. Her eyes looked brighter. She sat on a stool next to Lucy. She kept wetting her lip with her tongue.
The older man left the room.
“He’s going to check on his photos,” the younger man said. “You didn’t take anything, did you?”
Rosie shook her head no.
“I have another story. It’s about Richard Ramirez. When he went to this one lady’s house, she kept him there like half an hour talking. Then he left. He didn’t touch her. Do you know what she said to him? She said, ‘My God, what happened to you?’ And she listened. That was the main thing, she listened.”
“What happened to you?” Lucy whispered.
The light in the room changed. It
turned harsh. Emerson Solo was reclining on a chair. His skin was broken out, his hair was greasy, hanging in his eyes, and he had a bottle in one hand. His long legs were stretched out in front of him. A blue butterfly was inside the bottle.
“Get the fuck out of here,” the younger man said, very softly. He was not looking at Lucy. The light was in his glasses. He was being swallowed up by the strange light.
Lucy felt the spell crack apart like an eggshell. She grabbed Rosie’s hand. She pulled Rosie up from the stool. Rosie felt heavier, slower. Lucy dragged her sister out of the room. There was another staircase leading down to a back door.
Lucy flung herself down the staircase, pulling Rosie behind her.
“Lucy!” Rosie said.
A photograph had fallen out of Rosie’s pocket. It was of Emerson Solo sitting on a chair with his legs stretched out in front of him.
Rosie tried to grab the photo but Lucy kept dragging her down the stairs. Their footsteps pounded, echoing through the house. Lucy fell against the door with her shoulder and jiggled the lock. The door opened.
They were in a strange, overgrown garden. They tore through brambles. Lucy saw a crumbling stone staircase. She pulled Rosie down it, deeper into the bottom of the garden. A palm tree was wearing a dress of ivy. There was a broken swing moving back and forth. A white wrought-iron bench looked as if it had been thrown against a barbed wire fence. The bougainvillea had grown over it, holding it suspended.
The barbed wire was very intricate, silvery. It was like metal thorns or jewelry. There was one small opening in the bottom. Lucy crawled through. Rosie followed her. But then she stopped: her ankle was wreathed in a circlet of spikes. Lucy dropped to the ground and carefully slipped the anklet off her sister, not cutting her, not even catching her mismatched socks.
She pulled Rosie to her feet. They were standing on the road, across from the wilds of the canyon. There were no cars. Not even the sound of cars. The sky was blue and cloudless. Lucy felt a buzzing sensation in her head like bees or neon.
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