by Mark Teppo
"Catch me if you can," he said, and disappeared.
As Ossuera reached the door, the flare of a match rang through the corridor.
The old man had anticipated the turn. Ossuera was less adequately prepared for the sudden shift in trajectory, and slammed into the solid edge of the doorframe as she skidded to a stop.
Inside the small room, the old man had already seated himself in a folding chair. A card table stood before him, and on the table stood a flickering candle. Next to the candle rested a helmet. One small cable led from the helmet to an unobtrusive recess in the ceiling.
"It’s all over now, baby blue," whispered the old man, with a sad smile. His paper-thin cheeks showed fewer threads than Ossuera had come to expect.
Racks of equipment lined the wall behind the old man, but Ossuera ignored the shadowy forms. She stepped forward.
"No juice," said Ossuera. "What will you do?"
"Finish it," said the old man. "We’re inside the core."
With an air of finality the old man picked up the helmet, and Ossuera saw what had happened to his threads. From every fingertip, they extended. More threads ran from the cuffs of his uniform, from his collar, from what had once, like Ossuera’s, been hair. Threads trailed the edges of the table, wound through the frame of the folding chair, snaked along the ground, wove in and among and throughout the banks of equipment behind his gaunt frame, and disappeared into every dark recess.
Ossuera stepped closer.
The old soldier lowered the helmet upon his skull, and closed his eyes. A single green light pulsed to life on the rack behind him.
The low hum swelled from beneath the fortress, and filled Ossuera’s ears so suddenly that she was momentarily disoriented. It swelled at a constant pace, and for a brief moment she imagined the whole to be a gigantic capacitor, capable of pulsing out every reserve of energy in a single burst.
Her chest heaved against the sudden pressure. Her ears rang. Her vision swam toward darkness. The detached portion of Ossuera’s awareness debated whether she would be more likely to pass out, or vomit first.
Ossuera stumbled, ungracefully, around the old man’s table. One heavily threaded arm shot under the leathery throat. The other hand swung the small, chartreuse cylinder toward the old man’s helmet, with what Ossuera prayed would be enough force to shatter the seal.
It was.
Ossuera held her breath. Whatever had been in the cylinder was colorless, and the candle continued to burn.
The old man twisted under her grip, and Ossuera bent to meet his gaze.
"You still don’t know what that is, do you?"
"No," said Ossuera. Her hold slipped.
The old man broke into a wheezing chuckle, spasms shooting through his shoulders. "We used those to remove suits, when we were done with them."
Ossuera’s heart fell. They were in the core, and the old man had already connected himself to whatever the obscene thing was, that had taken their humanity. She did not have strength for another blow, and she did not have anything but a candlestick with which to deliver one if she could.
The old man continued to laugh. "Suits!" he roared. "Got to kill every damned thread of ‘em in a single pass, or they’ll come back three times as determined to patch you up! Long as they have juice—" He slapped the table, and left a smear.
"You were dying anyway," said Ossuera.
"I’ve been dead for almost a year," said the old man. "The suits used me up." He coughed, and a dark sludge trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Ossuera felt weak. Fragments of expired thread rained down upon the pair, as the extensions broke apart.
As Ossuera watched, the old man began to unravel. Dying threads extricated themselves with force, as though his body had suddenly become toxic. Bits of foreign matter that had eagerly been encapsulated during rushed repairs were disgorged, spilling about his cuffs and through the spaces between buttons.
Ossuera dropped her arm from the old man’s skeletal neck, and slid to her knees. The ink-stained motley dissolved as remnants of olive drab collapsed, and Ossuera let them go.
The candle flickered stoically, briefly flaring only for the bits of thread that continued to fall, as they touched its flame.
Ossuera’s skin was bright pink, raw and hairless. A few shards of glass still protruded near the surface of her ribs, and when she grasped the edges, they bled. Raising hands to her cheeks, she felt the slick of blood that poured from each eye. Her breath was drawn in short, choking gasps, and she gagged, causing a red stream to spill from her sinuses.
The floor of the small room was slick with blood, assorted fragments, a few teeth, and countless threads. Alone among them, one small object glittered in the candlelight.
Ossuera fell beside it, her gaze locked upon the bent, golden shape.
Days in quiet isolation suited her, as the threads had not.
Ossuera exercised, tended the few repairs that her suit had not finished, and daily inspected her flesh for any dark lines that might have survived.
She discounted the heavily shaded circles under her eyes, after the first week. After the second, Ossuera decided that the growth of short hairs returning to her scalp was too similar in appearance to an experience she wished only to forget, and shaved them off with one of the world’s few surviving safety razors.
The glass shards had been carefully removed, although Ossuera could not bring herself to stitch the wounds with thread. Once she was able to locate a cylinder’s worth of medical-grade adhesive she glued the edges, which soon began to heal and scar.
The one injury that would not adequately resolve itself was Ossuera’s recollection of all that had transpired. She did not know what lay outside the fortress. The memory of a single, ominous light pulsing green as the old man donned his helmet, and the all-permeating hum of the weapon buried beneath the fortress, had been seared into Ossuera’s dreams.
After a number of weeks, Ossuera stepped outside. She was not sure how long she had been in the fortress. Forty days? Forty-two?
A solitary crow flew past with a small ear of corn, and Ossuera winced at the sight of dried silks dangling from the end of the ear. She imagined what threads would do to a crow.
The golden sunlight that followed the trail of destruction had given way to a soft, gray overcast. With all the sky the color of smoke, Ossuera imagined that she could once again smell meat cooking.
Her vision wavered, as it had among the flames. The dull clouds seemed to shimmer, just as the blades of grass beneath her feet seemed to roll and tumble with the light breeze.
On the horizon, a ripple of cloud dipped to touch the earth.
Not a cloud. Smoke.
Ossuera hesitated. A wide swath of untended cornfield separated her from what might be nothing more than a lightning strike or a brush fire.
A vast field of yellowing, grass-edged blades, slowly dying in the field.
She closed her eyes and focused on the small object in her hand. Warm. Metallic. Not cylindrical.
Ossuera strained to hear any sound beyond the slow swish of leaves, or the creak of desiccated stalks.
She heard a few crickets, and noticed the flurry of a grasshopper’s wings as it explored the abandoned harvest. A soft rustle that might have been mice, similarly inclined, or a snake, in pursuit of a field mouse, drew her attention.
She heard no songs, and no child-like voice.
With a deep breath, Ossuera gripped the bent piece of gold. She thought about the young girl’s song—a bare melody.
She still did not know the words. Words did not matter.
She started to run.
As she separated the stalks, leaves slashed her shoulders, and tore at her knuckles, so that warm blood trickled from open lacerations. They flowed freely, and Ossuera’s eyes streamed.
She paused to inhale, dried cornstalks and dust and mildew and the hope of something that might be smoke intermingling, and fresh, and burned, and raw.
Ossuera was cert
ain the switch was no longer halfway on. There could be no slow flicker toward darkness.
Once more, she ran. Once again, she felt alive.
Ossuera was a good soldier.
Rabbit, Cat, Girl
— Rebecca Kuder
If I’m the one to tell this story, there will be gaps. I can only see things as I see them. I stay in the house these days. In my hours, stretchy as they are, I’ve had little time for more than thought; still I have trouble making thoughts walk toward words, trouble explaining in ways you will understand. Something to do with the stinging in my eyes. But I will tell you what I know.
We will have no autumn this year. The season has been stolen, replaced by perpetual summer. It’s been hot like this for ages; you remember that thaw a few months ago. How could ice survive this heat? The iceman used to call out, "Ice! Ice!" and the girl’s father gathered money and gave it over, to buy a block of winter. The girl’s grandfather had worked ice, too; her father told stories, how her grandfather’s back was stronger than a beam. The beam still gave out at the end. The girl’s iceman would take tongs, plunk the block in the bin, and let it begin the melting. See the box still there on the porch. Oh, I’d give all my money to lean over now, wrap myself around that metal box, and relieve myself of this heat.
But that isn’t the story you want.
You want to know about the girl. I want to tell you. But I must begin with rabbits.
Here’s what I know: there have been rabbits since the start of the world, gnawing the sharp drygrass when there are no tender green spring shoots. They burrow into the bases of catalpa trees, and under bushes, hiding like vermin. Some people find rabbits endearing, benevolent like the smiling Easter Bunny, a chocolate charade, lurking beneath false rebirth of spring. Soft and so helpless, they hop like little innocents, and grow like armies, eating everything. Have you ever studied a rabbit’s teeth?
The girl’s father hunted rabbits. In them, he saw food. They had to eat. The girl hated to eat rabbits; she was always left with the taste of their teeth.
She had a toy rabbit, sinister gift from her father. Easter. A puffball of white wool, pink bead eyes carefully wrought, it fit in her seven-year-old hand. Felt ears, as if they needed delicacy, as if they were only for hearing. When she went to the beauty parlor with her mother, ladies looked at her holding that soft monster, cooed, and said, "Oh how darling!" But at night, the rabbit, absent all good intent, stretched in shadow, entered her dreams, fangs first. Don’t kid yourself; I know the story, look closer: Alice was terrified of the March Hare. It wasn’t the Mad Hatter pulling the puppet strings of everything.
The girl’s house burned. I’ll get back to that when I can.
After the fire, the girl went out to what remained of the shed, and stood there, foot tracing shapes in the black char. She saw something white, small, unsullied. The toy rabbit, unburned, pink eyes peering up, dared her to pick it up. It shivered; it moved in her hand, more proof that those beasts will outlive us all.
But cats are different. Larger, smarter, hunting only for food. Well-fed cats will sometimes bring small gifts, guts of unidentifiable rodents, carcass cleaved, chewed, left behind. Oh, the organs are the prize. As a child, the girl kept a cat she loved. The cat slept for hours curled by her belly, even in the sweet heat of July, back when the damp around the girl’s hairline was temporary. Cat fur stuck to her: the animal couldn’t help it, had to shed. In sleep, the cat protected the girl from rabbit-fiends. Even after the fire, she could only sleep with the cat in place, no matter the season.
If you looked at that cat’s eyes, you would see their perfect grass-green hue, the color of spring that the Easter Bunny could only approximate. Cats are the real resurrection.
Sometimes the girl thought she was a cat. In particular, that cat; its grey fluff became the girl’s covering. How can I not recall the cat’s name? The girl would look in the mirror and see green eyes peer back, strange because could a cat stand on hind legs to look in that glass? Was a cat so tall? I suppose so. Or so it appeared to the girl, at intervals, when she was two, three, five, seven. During those raw, nearly indivisible years.
After she became seven was the fire. Which was not the rabbit’s fault. Unless it was.
Fire the color of blood, blood the color of life. But that’s a lie. Have you noticed? Fire is not the color of blood. Fire is several colors, and blood is just one: bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump. Fire is trickier. Fire tricks. It licks at the tendrils of a house, tantalizing, and the girl could not look away, and that fire stole green from her, her green eyes, her green soul, all the green shoots out back in the field, that fire and those damn rabbits took it all, masticated it. Chewed, chewed, and spit or shit it out, green gone, so all that’s left is one color of red, bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump.
Why this trinity? Why always three? Rabbit, cat, girl.
I need a breeze, but there’s only a cruel ring of sweat around my hairline. You might not notice at first, but come closer, see that tiny river? It’s made of drip, so small and thin it erodes my skin, its darkness possibly mistaken for un-dyed roots in need of a perk-up. A trip to the beauty parlor would not be bad. The girl’s mother used to go there—before she left home—and the girl went along, carrying the burden of rabbit. A trip to the beauty parlor for me would not be bad. Not for obvious reasons like vanity, but because I would be touched. To be touched, with the speed and energy of upwell that makes those lilies of the valley stretch greenly up through dead ground, slowly showing first their green bubbles, and then green becomes white, bubbles become tumors of perfume. Tender bells, baby hats. Didn’t the girl’s grandmother smell like those flowers, or am I recalling her painted porcelain vase, small enough for a child’s clumsy handful of the green shoots and their pearly baubles? Or was it her mother who smelled so sweet? So sickening? Or was it the girl herself?
Children used to sing this song in spring. The girl used to sing this song, in spring:
White coral bells upon a slender stalk,
Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk.
Oh, don’t you wish
That you could hear them ring?
That will happen only when the fairies sing!
How lovely the lilies of the valley are, dead, brown-edged, drooping in the vase, the stem-slope curvier than when fresh, somehow more truly themselves, more graceful as they relax, tender bells now browning, baby hats tumbling off.
Years since I’ve considered such frills, but now the girl’s grandmother’s vase-full trembles here. To see another human, to pay the human to touch my hand, clean and varnish the nails, let the tips dry, then apply warm water—Yes! Even in this heat!—to my scalp, massage sweetsoap. Oh for the shushing of hair full of lather, that luxury. Do I still have hair? If I could find a mirror, I would explore that question, seek evidence, assemble my thoughts and muscles so I could step toward the glass and see what she could see.
The girl’s mother left long before the fire. I’m still relieved about this, though the girl had her heartbreak at the time. And after she left, the girl’s father was no softer. Her mother was never happy in this house. No one liked to clean, but the job fell to her, and the windows were hateful work. Once a year, usually in spring, her mother would take vinegar and tell the girl to get a pile of dusty gazettes, discarded words good for something, home to many spiders or possible spiders (those faint grey creatures that the girl wasn’t sure if she had actually seen would dance slow and pale across the stack of papers).
They fascinated the girl; these frail ghosts spanned this world and the next, their intention only to find a safe place to hide, sometimes tiptoeing—do spiders have toes?—onward toward the heat register, the hereafter. How could the girl fear them? They feared her. Their tender wisp legs like her grandmother’s china, not meant for everyday use.
Once a year she saw or imagined those spiders.
Cleaning the windows, the girl’s mother used her uncommon words, dark words, things like, "damn Godfors
aken hovel," and such. The girl didn’t comprehend her mother’s anger. It felt like a cold thing, an icebox, hidden in her all the time, kept up in the cabinet of her heart, always visible but only released for special occasions, like windows. The girl always wondered why the mother left and left her here. Her father wondered, too. He didn’t save his foulness for special occasions. After her mother left, those words became their everyday dishes. The girl cooked the gruel, but her father provided the anger, the hatred.
After the fire and everything happened, the girl’s father moved on to the next town, maybe looking for his wife, maybe for some next woman to ruin with child. I had a lot of time to think. Plenty of quiet. If a man is unhappy, so will his woman be. Maybe that works the other way, too, and maybe it’s impossible to untangle certain kinds of unhappiness. Maybe it’s really just who has the fortitude to stay. I am still sorting out why I stayed here. I guess that’s part of the point of my telling you this story. It is sometimes important to sit on the back stoop, to name as many dead cats as I can recall, to wish someone had written down their names, marked places where they remained. Now just lacy bones. If that. Sometimes I consider going back there, as I look out at the high brown weeds, years of (ignored, unintentional, accidental) crop, mingling with unruined new green points; that’s life still trying, grass, still stretching toward something good, the sun. I sometimes think I’ll dig up bones, see if the girl’s good child-mind returns to distinguish one skeleton from another. Would the shape of a skull illuminate whether it belonged to the cat Heliotrope or the cat John? But it was that first cat, with unrecalled name, the one the girl loved best. If I could see better and find those cat bones, I would begin to understand some things.
Like the fire. I don’t know how it started. The father was who-knows-where; the girl was sleeping, dreaming that the cat was curled as usual, and it wasn’t the burning smell that woke the girl, not smoke, but the cat’s absence. For the cat had died and been buried a year before, and only returned and curled in dreams. The dream cat had awakened with the real fire’s swirly smoke, and had escaped to wherever dream cats go. Like the Cheshire Cat, as Alice knew, these cats have secret places, but the girl had only a bed, and when she woke, she coughed and choked. Blind, she tried to find the stairs, but all their wood was melting in that color of fire that isn’t blood, the licking color of speed and heat and then as even the lilies of the valley singed outside, it all tumbled forward, as things always do.