What the #@&% Is That?

by John Joseph Adams

  Scarlett was sad about the suiciders too, but not as sad as Reese was. Scarlett had a natural figure for fortune, and knew how to sew. She stitched up a party dress from dishtowels, wriggled into it, and went out to the first school dance of the year wearing shoplifted lipstick. Within a minute, she was leading cheers at the football games, and nobody cared that she was missing some back teeth and had a crooked arm from breaking it during battle training.

  Scarlett had strawberry blond hair and unlikely curves, a waist like a funnel. Reese was the reverse. Her body was round, with tiny wrists and ankles. She had curls, tight ones the color of cake batter, and eyes so pale they looked blind. She was smart as a whipsnake, which tricked people. Her albino coloring made people in Miracle think she was mental. She wasn’t. She was going somewhere. She was a genius in ways that might scare a person if you didn’t know for sure she liked you. Then there was me, Natalie, with a scar where my lip had been prayed back together, my body a unified width from chest to hips, the same turned sideways as front.

  My mama was adopted when she was nine from Delhi, and Reese’s when she was six from Ethiopia, and they both started as Littlest Wives. We didn’t know where Scarlett came from. Her mama’d died of a rattlesnake when she was three, and then her dad dropped her off on the compound, and that’s how she ended up married to the Preacher. She was no relation to him. The other two of us were chastely married to our father.

  No one really regulated the religious, and so the Preacher had saved a bunch of girls from uncertain futures in countries other than America. By saved I mean saved for first marrying and then suiciding. In theory, this was no one’s fault, the fact that no one helped to save any of the older wives from death once Heaven’s Avengers decided to suicide, but some part of me had started to wonder if every agency actually just felt like sacrificing a few people every year in lieu of doing their proper jobs. Most of us were brown. Most of the people around us were not. Maybe we’d been purged by lack of social work. I didn’t like thinking it, but I thought it anyway, and it put me in a pissed-off place. School was hard. This was why. All us three were suffering badly from the pissed-offs.

  No one knew much about us, and we kept it that way. We’d been the Sisters Stuart for a year when the carnival showed up. People called us that without irony. We didn’t correct them. Privately, we called each other Little Widow.

  The carnival came in a truck and a tent, and it looked like shit, but we were still interested. We liked new things. It set up just outside of Miracle. We hadn’t seen television until recently. The fire onscreen was the first time I’d ever watched the news. I didn’t know much about fairs, nor about carnivals, and neither did the other two, so we dressed up in our best clothes and walked out over to the grassless ground of the high school football field.

  There was a big poster of a girl in a yellow bikini covered in fringe and holding a chicken. I pointed at it. We’d never had bikinis. Reese put her hands on my head and fluttered up my hair. She’d been studying the world. She had a boyfriend again, one with a license to fly a crop duster, and they were having sex. She’d learned how to fly the crop duster, too. She was planning things about the rest of her life.

  “Don’t worry, Little Widow,” she said. “She’s not that great.”

  But I was staring.

  “Can we go see her?” I asked.

  “She’s only a stripper,” said Scarlett, and cracked her bubblegum. I didn’t know what a stripper was. I thought it had something to do with crows and crops, or maybe threshing.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I want to see her.”

  GEEK said the sign, in giant letters. The tent was as yellow as the bikini, and also trimmed in fringe, and outside it, there was a big bearded man with a flat black hat lazing around, looking too warm. His arms were all over tattoos of naked ladies and pirate ships. They weren’t good tattoos. We had better.

  The women of Heaven’s Avengers were artists at tattooing. Each one of us had a small suit of armor under our clothes. It grew with us. I got mine when I was seven, the year I became Littlest Wife. It was an eight-hour tattoo on my solar plexus, and afterwards, it felt like chickenpox mixed with a third-degree burn, both of which I’d also had.

  “It’s a buck,” the man said. “Seventy-five cents if you show me your tits.”

  Scarlett looked at him coldly. “I have made a covenant with mine eyes,” she said. “How then could I gaze at a virgin? Job, 31:1.”

  “Damn,” he said, offended. “I was only messing with you.”

  “Messing leads to trouble, and trouble leads to regrets,” she said, and stabbed him in the eyeballs with her worst white light. She spilled a shower of purse-change into his bucket, and we went in.

  “I’m not a virgin,” she said, wiping her hand on her skirt. “But, Little Widows, that’s what nasty is asking for. He may break out in boils next.”

  I had no doubt on that. Scarlett was not someone anyone should mess with.

  The tent was dark inside. We sat down in folding chairs and stared at the curtains and the stage, a wooden platform with more fringe on it. There were a lot of people in the tent, most of Miracle’s population, male category. Us three were the only girls, but no one bothered us about it. No one wanted to talk to us when we were together. They thought they might catch cult like catching flu.

  Separately, we were no fuss to anyone, but when we walked down the main road, people crossed it, and anyone who stepped in our sister shadow shook himself. They weren’t wrong. When we were together, we were scary on purpose. We were perfectly capable of being regular, but we didn’t see the point. Regular might get us nabbed by some other cult, and we weren’t in the market for culting. We worried someone would snatch us and then we’d be under the thumb of a plum stealer again. We weren’t in the mood for any more of that. We wanted, ultimately, to be normal. As normal as we could be. We were interested in flush toilets and potato chips.

  The curtains didn’t open, but they started to move, the fringe bobbing around like horses on the gallop, and I leaned forward to check if I could see anyone’s feet. This was the best I’d felt in months, since the rest of everyone went to heaven, and Reese and Scarlett felt pretty good too. They were on either side of me, and they each took one of my hands when the curtains shimmied up and the music started playing.

  “Step right up,” said someone, and a girl came out. No one stepped up, but I felt like stepping. The girl was tanned with braided black hair, and her yellow bikini stood out against her skin like it was made of sun. It was covered with fringe, and it jiggled like a haystack on a flatbed. She was not much older than we were, and in her hands, she had a basket.

  “You wanna see the devil dance?” the girl asked the tent, and the tent stamped its feet. Lust in the air in here. We could smell it.

  “Well, I’m not the devil,” she said. “And I don’t dance. I’m a geek.”

  Nobody stamped for that. No one was quite sure what to do. But beside me, I felt Scarlett smiling.

  The girl set the basket on the ground and stalked around it. “Do you know what you’re getting into? Do you know why you’re here, Miracle? That the name of this little town?”

  “Yes,” I said, from the back row. “This here’s Miracle.”

  Somebody shushed me, but they turned around, saw Scarlett and Reese, and stopped shushing.

  “You ever seen a girl bite off someone’s head?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s a dying art,” said the girl casually, and then squatted down and pulled the top off the basket. I leaned forward.

  She pulled out a chicken, and looked up at the audience as she put her teeth around its neck. I blinked. Three men got up and out of there. Everyone else stayed still, because there was no way she was going to do what she looked like she was going to do.

  The chicken made a whirr, deep in its throat. She took her mouth off it, and it clucked.

  “The feathers make it easier,” she said. “The feathers make
it feel like you’re biting down on a pillow, like you’re dreaming a great dream of heaven. But you don’t want to see me kill a bird, do you, Miracle? I could eat a white dove flying midair. Sometimes, I hold a flock of sparrows in my mouth and spit them out one at a time. That’s basic carnival shit. We’re all better than that, aren’t we? Today, I’ve got something special for you.”

  She put the chicken down and it tripped away, over the wood, shedding feathers. The bird had bells around its ankles. It pecked its way out into the audience, jingling and clucking.

  She pulled on long yellow leather gauntlets. The Preacher’d thought that fighting angels might require falconry skills, so I knew what they were. She went back into the basket and brought something else out.

  There was a quiet gasp in the tent, and then people started to mutter, because the thing she was holding wasn’t possible.

  “What the fuck is that?” someone said, and then someone else said it back, echoing like the tent had gone box canyon.

  The pterodactyl had feathers, so that at first you might mistake it for a crow, but it wasn’t. It had a pointy skull with a crest heading backward from it, and membranous wings, each one supported by a long, thorny finger. The feathers were the color of oil on asphalt. The girl held it tightly in her cupped hands, and it struggled slightly, making a high chitter. It had bright black eyes.

  “That’s a dinosaur,” I said to Reese, and Reese said “yep,” and Scarlett said “yep,” and then we all folded our hands in our laps. It was real. It was a pterodactyl. We knew about dinosaurs. Heaven’s Avengers had a book of all the different kinds and the kids got it for a treat sometimes. I’d had it to myself the whole first week I was Littlest Wife.

  “This is one of our pterodactyls,” the girl said, and looked into the audience, her painted eyebrows up. “Want to check if it’s real? You. In the back. Get your hands here.”

  I was already halfway down the aisle. None of the men of Miracle wanted to touch a dinosaur. A few more were rushing right out, past Scarlett, looking longingly at her, the kind of girl they’d thought they were coming in here to see. They were on the way to carnival food. We’d smelled fried dough on the way in, and seen a cotton candy stand. I wondered if they thought the dinosaur was a lizard dressed up with fake wings. They acted like it would be more interesting to see a naked girl than an extinct reptile, but I’d seen a lot of naked girls in the fifty-wife bathhouse.

  I wanted a world full of dinosaurs. I wanted the ground to shake.

  “Touch it,” she said.

  I was on the stage beside her, looking at her fringe, at her hands in their yellow leather, and at the way they pinched into the little dinosaur’s scales. She smelled like cigarettes and chocolate. Her lipstick was orange and drawn on with a sharp pencil, the bows of her lips extra pointy. I could see the glue for her fake eyelashes.

  In her hands was something as perfect as she was. The pterodactyl was chicken-sized, almost exactly, its body the size of my palms put together, with wings about three feet in span. It was cold to the touch, like a snake, and its down was as soft as angora, but it didn’t look like it had much in the way of brain. It did have a lot of teeth. It looked at me and opened its mouth.

  “You’re going to bite its head off?” I asked her.

  “That’s the show.”

  “But what if it’s the last one on Earth?”

  She beckoned me in and whispered in my ear, all the while shimmying her hips to give the audience something to see.

  “We have a lot of them,” she said. “They’re common as chickens, if you know what you’re looking for.”

  I looked up into the crowd and saw Reese and Scarlett looking back at me.

  “Would you like to hold its neck in your teeth?” the girl asked me. The audience shifted uncomfortably. I could hear folding chairs creaking.

  “That’s one of the cult kids!” someone shouted from the back. Desperate, high voice, voice of an old man. “That’s one of the girls that killed themselves! You don’t want to give her a chance to kill something else or she’ll go wild! They’re all crazy from out there!”

  “We didn’t kill ourselves,” Reese said, with dignity.

  “Look at us,” Scarlett said. “We’re absolutely alive.”

  But both of them were standing up, Reese in her pink starched dress and Scarlett in her flowered curtain fabric. They looked intimidating up there, in the light, with the sawdust in the air. They looked like what the town thought we might be.

  I already had the lizardy neck in my mouth, and the girl in the yellow bikini met my eyes and nodded. I bit down hard, and cold blood came into my throat, through the softness and the down, through the dinosaur wings. Rough scales. No resistance. It went limp between my teeth, and I stood in front of Miracle, in my best dress, biting a dinosaur.

  I let go of it, and the headless pterodactyl took flight and did a circle around the tent, blood sputtering out like a sprinkler.

  People screamed. Most of them were freaking and getting the hell out of the tent. I had no regrets.

  The other two Sisters were already out of their seats and down to the stage. People were rushing out, and a grown man vomited, which annoyed me. I pulled some feathers out of my teeth. This was what I’d been trained for. This was what I’d imagined it might be like to fight an angel. We’d been raised for this kind of combat. Who knew what kinds of lizards populated heaven? Who knew that heaven hadn’t already been colonized? The girl in yellow was grinning at me, and I wiped blood off my chin.

  “That wasn’t wise, Little Widow,” said Scarlett, and sighed.

  “She couldn’t help it,” said Reese. “You can’t spend a life being trained to do battle and think she wouldn’t do this.” She turned to the carnival geek. “What do you want? You’re not normal.”

  The dinosaur’s body dropped out of the air and fell down at my feet. I looked down at the head in my hand and for a moment, it looked like a chicken. Then like a baby. Then like a pile of rubber and feathers. I could taste salt and tar. The prong at the back of its head was soft and malleable, like a rooster’s comb.

  “What kind of carnival is this?” said Scarlett, and the girl just looked at her.

  “We heard about you three,” the girl said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “What did you hear?” asked Reese.

  “Your people took over some contested land.”

  My mouth got dry. “Our people?”

  “I’m from up there,” said the girl in yellow. “I work for your mamas now.”

  She didn’t look like an angel. But what did we know? We’d been trained to kill angels, not to like them, and this girl was a girl I liked already.

  “I’m Valerie,” she said, and shook out her black braids. Her hair was as long as mine had been. “You want to join us?”

  This was what we had dreaded. This was a recruitment. Why didn’t I mind?

  Reese had a very stiff spine. “I have a boyfriend here,” she said.

  “Do you want out of this town, Sister?” asked Valerie. “You do. It’s written all over you. You don’t care for him more than you care for yourself. Come help us out in heaven.”

  “Do you know the Preacher?” Scarlett asked her, suspicious. I was suspicious too. I’d come to the conclusion that Littlest Wife was nothing right. There was a social worker at the school who kept trying to hand me stuffed animals so we could talk about love.

  “Know him?” Valerie said, and laughed. “We came down here for him, too. We have him in the back of the cargo truck with Rexie.”

  We stood there for a moment, in the sawdust, blinking.

  This was how we found out that our father had not in fact suicided his way to heaven but had left his own soda undosed. This was how we learned that he’d taken off and stayed alive, letting the rest of Heaven’s Avengers fight angels without him. Valerie took us to him.

  * * * *

  The cage was big, dark, and dirty, full of hay, and the Preacher looked up when
Valerie brought us in.

  “Sister,” he said. “Sister and Sister.”

  We were quiet for a minute. There he was, worse for the wear, this old man in a dirty shirt with no cult. He’d lost his beard, and his face without it looked skinny and toothy. He looked like the pterodactyl, but not beautiful. I could see where the back of his head might be soft.

  I thought about biting through his spine, putting my teeth in and shaking my head. I thought about a frenzy, me and the rest of the Little Widows. We could shred him limb from limb. We could spread his entrails over acres. We could tear him into tiny pieces and strew him about, a sacrifice, a religious act. We knew how to kill a man with the maximum amount of pain. Men were easier to kill than angels.

  I heard Scarlett inhale. Normally, we would have sent white light, or I would’ve balanced some crystals on my hands and prayed the bars away. We were no longer normal.

  “You bastard,” Scarlett screamed and flew at the cage, rattling it. “You cowardly motherfucker!”

  We’d always known how to swear. It was part of our training. We’d figured “damn it” might be useful in a land of the undamned.

  “Murderer,” Reese hissed, and poked him through the bars with the handle of a muck shovel.

  The Preacher looked reduced.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he whimpered. “I never wanted this gig. I inherited Heaven’s Avengers from my papa. It was my legacy. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to die, but dying was the deal.”

  I spat at him. A fleck of dinosaur blood hit his cheek.

  Valerie was looking on in pride, I thought, and so I spat at my husband again.

  “I’m not your wife anymore,” I said. “Neither are they. No one gets to have that many wives. There’s no prize like that in the actual world.”