How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  Behind her, a cough. One of those diplomatic, throat-clearing noises humans make when they hope to be noticed but are too polite to interrupt.

  He was his own length away from her, looking down at her while his ears kept their duty.

  Plucked by the wren, its squeak a taunt, its puff head tick-ticking this way that way, tugging his own head in circles. He could reach it at a jump. He could reach it at a jump but. Something crawled into his ear, and he shook his head, and the shaking made him—

  “Bless you,” she answered and began to crawl toward him. His eyes gleamed. Brown cloud streaked the orange, as if some sediment from the waterbed had been stirred. From this angle, his eyes had a glassy, colorless surface that domed protectively over those swirls, like an expensive paperweight. Mary knelt a moment, rubbed the twigs off her palms while he watched.

  There was something she needed to say, but it was hard to say, so she kept picking bits from her hands while she waited for the words to come. She shuffled forward on her knees until she was close enough to see his nostrils flicker. “Thank you,” she told him, her hands on her breast. In her life, she had never meant anything more. “Thank you. For believing in me. For what you did for me.” His fur began to run through her tears. She sat back on her heels and opened her arms, waiting for him to step into her embrace, but his paws stayed put, and he lowered his snout to her. She dabbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand and looked down at her scuzzy top and joggers. “Yes, I rushed out as soon as I woke. Didn’t even shower. But look, I’ve got a bag,” she said, standing up and showing him the duffel. “Enough for a few days.” It was implausibly fortunate to have found him so soon. They would be down the alley long before the fox catcher arrived.

  “Oh no!” she said, seeing him sit with the sudden collapse function in his legs. He looked at her meaningfully and began to wash. “You can do that later. We’ve got to go.” She shook out her legs, to show him what she meant.

  When he still didn’t move, she said, “Last night … oh God.” There was no way round it. “I told them I saw you. I had to! I’m so sorry. They thought I’d taken her.” His ears folded toward her quizzically. “Please forgive me. I was desperate, and not just that; I felt so … so proud of you and of us, and I said it without thinking. From now on, I’ll say nothing. I know what it feels like to be betrayed.” She thought of Mark, of Dawn stabbing her in the back, of her own mother’s treacherous disinterest. “I would never hurt you,” she said. “I’ve come to save you.”

  She raised her hands to tell him to stand, and he balked, let up licking his paw and looked at her, then back at the wren. “I’m trying to talk to you!” she exclaimed with rising panic. “Stop staring at that bloody bird and concentrate! You are waiting in the first place they’ll look!” She kicked a fern in despair, and dry flecks and insects flew up from its crispy shudder. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I don’t mean to shout. I’m just so worried, and I feel responsible. If I don’t get you out of here, who will?” Her palms were sticky with sweat, and with a pang she realized they had had their first argument.

  * * *

  LICK A PAW, pretend to wash an ear. Let the wren think he was busy.

  * * *

  MARY LOOKED AROUND the woods. Life was leaving all the collapsed straps of bulbs, taking the green. Yellow stealing in. Greener things climbing over the top. Some kind of life cycle had begun to close before her eyes. Nature’s way of telling her, as if she didn’t know, that this was all coming to an end. She could not stand here peeved and despairing while the leaves rustled and the birds whistled.

  “There’s a trapper coming,” she said. “I’m so sorry to be blunt. He wants to catch or kill you. That’s why I’m here. We can head to the gate together, then on to the park. We’ll blend in more easily there. But we have no time to lose.” She managed to keep her voice calm when she said, “We have to go now.”

  The pink in the clouds was beginning to disperse, and still he was rooted to his spot. “Come on!” she said. “Just leave it. There will be plenty of those for you to look at in the park. Let’s go!”

  * * *

  TWO WORMS. TIED together. Lying neck to neck, a rich white band. Joined somewhere he could not see. Two worms thickening. Their tube bodies shrinking / stretching, as they piped obliviously. Rubbery rubbing, the grate and rasp of indigestible setae chafing. Liquid earth juicing outward. Rich soil odor damply rising.

  He blinked. His eyes had begun to cross. Before his mouth taught him, worm scent tripped him. Male? Female? Yes, yes. Male and Female. Both at once. Every worm the same. Not like foxes. He lowered his snout toward the nearer him / her that was pressing into the further him / her that was pressing into the nearer him / her. Both doing both jobs. Sharing everything same / same. He let his snout prod the closest one. He / she must have felt his whiskers but kept throating away. He had tried this trick before. He pushed at the edge of them with a paw. Nothing could part worms busy with love. True fact. He hoisted them in two for one. It took twice as long.

  They were still singing in his gullet when a magpie landed on a branch and the wren flew and the branch bounced. Jerking his head. The magpie’s eye was a game of dare. She hopped to the ground, and he watched her strut. Muzzle swaying, tail up. Waiting for the right moment. Timing. Birds. All about timing.

  “Come on!” Mary yelled. “Now!” She had never seen a magpie run. But at her cry, it started to sprint, its black legs clawing forward one after another. It dug out each pace, the back of its neck an oily glint, a reek of mackerel in its wake, and the message passed from the magpie’s feet, iron toes cracking skeleton leaves, into his mouth.

  “Oh, well, thank you!” she said. He had finally understood and was jogging into the thicket. She followed him, following her plan. It was a race to keep up on her hands and knees, twigs gnawing at her palms, ferns flicking her face, but though the stones and lumpy earth pummeled the bones of her knees, she didn’t want to walk and be spotted. The path eased when she entered the bracken. A narrow trail gleamed within the rusty tunnel of leaves, and his paws lined up inside it. Each filled the space of the one in front, as if his hind feet would trust only his front feet’s prints. At every step they released a vapor of wet musk, the puff of an invisible atomizer. Mary reached for the tip of his brush and held it. The tail gave a little throb as she squeezed; then he walked on. They were heading the right way for the gate.

  After a few minutes, he veered off the track, and Mary watched him flick his tail while he rubbed his hindquarters against an old bedside table. The air flapped her face with a dark flag of scent. “Keep moving, darling,” she whispered as he rejoined the trail ahead of her. The world was waking up around them. A van slowed on the street to her right, an engine turning over its thoughts.

  He tipped his snout and let it hover side to side, cresting the scent waves. Crows lifted out of the trees above them, and when Mary understood they were cawing in honor of her and Rafael, her heart leapt at the unexpected validation of them as a pair. Mark had always seen himself as her rescuer, and a part of her—just a small part—longed for him to see her now. She had turned herself around. She was the one thinking ahead, organizing, chasing, saving. A sense of purpose pumped through her arms, and she sped up through a patch of spent bulbs and long grasses. One after another they folded their way through broad sheaths of flat leaves, cool and comfortable as cotton to her hands. Then a short way ahead he stopped.

  A fern frond was swaying while all the fronds around it were still. He revolved an ear. The sway stilled but. Too late, Beetle! His feet were in the air. He snatched her from the stalk. His teeth crick-cracked the wing cases while he looked around to see if she had brought any friends.

  “Concentrate!” Mary reminded him. “We don’t have time for this.” At best, his sense of urgency was fitful. She had hoped to tackle the trip to the park before the pavements thickened with commuters, but on her hands and knees, she had lost all sense of how far they had come, how much time had
passed. When she turned to look behind her, she saw only the pale green shine of the path they had flattened. Ahead, the neat strip he was threading. Above—it was hard to see beyond the green. Somewhere up there a bird was making heavy work of a tune, its puff and whistle like the wheeze of a bicycle pump.

  Mary rocked back onto her heels and scraped the hair out of her eyes with her wrist. Her hands were caked with powdered dirt. Dust lined all the cracks and creases in her fingers, and no amount of picking would shift it. She wiped her nose on her shoulder, smearing her top brown, and gave an exasperated cry at the sight of Rafael disappearing into a huge nettle bed.

  When she came out the other side, Mary saw that they had reached the eastern end of the woods. A fragment of brick wall peeped through the ivy, laced with magenta roses. From one of the gardens on Drovers Lane a human was calling a cat for breakfast. She watched Rafael’s ears fidget at the sound. They had reached the brink of civilization again. She turned to get her bearings and through the trees glimpsed the red gate.

  “Nearly there!” she called. There were times when she had felt unsure they were going to make it. “Actually, it’s this way,” she cajoled, seeing him stalk instead toward a large oak. “Trust me. They are coming. Sooner than we know. We have to get you out of here.”

  From Drovers Lane they would walk straight to the park. Once there, they would make for the woodland section, with felled trunks, seats made out of stumps, and where the leaves grew so thickly it was impossible to see in from the outside. Mary focused on where they were going, partly to avoid thinking about how they were going to get there. She could hardly transport herself from garden to garden. They would have to stick to the pavement. What an odd couple they were going to make on their first public outing.

  “This will blow over in a few days,” she said, catching him up at the oak. “Think of it as a little holiday. What’s the matter?”

  He stood on his hind legs. His forepaws clawed up the trunk. She looked at his long, muscular back, but instead of turning to answer, his head disappeared into the tree. When he dropped to the ground, something jammed open his jaws.

  She felt his eyes on her as she moved toward the oak. When she saw the hollow in its trunk, she looked at him for permission before reaching inside. Her hand paddled in a little nest, soft with the accreted slough of tree skin, until it found something hard. “How did that get there?” she asked in amazement. And then, seeing his fur thicken, “It’s OK. I’m going to put it back.” There was nothing unique about the egg, right down to the orange lion printed on its shell.

  “The gate,” she said, pointing. “See the gate?”

  * * *

  HIS STOMACH HIT the brambles. Whiskers batted silence to the bee jamming in the bramble flower irking his focus. A metallic clunking upwind. Death. He thought when he heard it. A clash no teeth can tear or crack. Noise tougher than superstrength Beetle case. Another clang. Heavy. Metal impact. Ringing in his ears. Making every other sound fade. In his head, the smoky fast growl that hit her. A gentle crunch. She was always gentle. The crunch was her, not it. Bones colliding, denting, flaking.

  Close by, a clink. Said the mastiff had stood, stretched. Yelped ask to her human. The mastiff rattled. Sitting down. The rattle.

  Took him back to the crunch. It was dark. Out together, working closely. You sniff that way; I’ll sniff this. Your scent, my scent. Berries and spice. Our special defense. Put it on thickly. No scent spared. She wandered off to check—he never knew. What attracted her. Something good. Must have been something good. Her eyes glowed green when the giant eyes shone on her. He barked warning, but she didn’t turn. One ear answered him with a flicker. Her last look she gave to the eyes that killed her. The growl went over her back. For no reason. Didn’t even stop to eat her.

  She was dead when he trotted to her side. He stood over her, licked her blood, her fur. Her one ear still spiked. But. Only for a bit. It didn’t help. She tasted wrong. Berries slammed with metal. He waited. Barked but. She lay still. He had seen her do that once, running from a Doberman. She lay in the road. Trained her heart to barely beat. Playing dead. Not playing. Hiding to be free. When the dog stood over her, she leapt and snapped, fled. He found her back at the den. But she wasn’t not dead / dead this time. She was dead / dead. Still he trotted to the den. Waited. First light he went to find her again. Thinking. The cubs should have been out. Could have been out. What if they did? They were so close to their time. Earth all ready. Everything dug deep and cool and nice. Burrows and tunnels and resting spaces. Two exits. Cover above. A roof made of roots. Big store of food. He went to check, but no cubs had come. Just she was flatter. He—. He saw her now in flashes like her eyes. Green eyes. Ear pricked. Lying. Flat. Cubs. He saw them, but not really. Cubs in his head. Cubs next year if life was good. Nights growing longer. Vixen soon. All this space and food. An ear furrowed at the Female crouching the other side of the tree. The mastiff yowled, and again the sound came.

  He lay down his ear. It was only a gate opening.

  * * *

  THERE WAS PEACE crouching by the oak, looking up at the tall stories of its trunk, a song on every branch, each leaf exercising its will. The world was going about its wild business, with no care for Michelle and Eric. From Drovers Lane, Mary heard the high-pitched beeping of a vehicle reversing. At last Rafael seemed satisfied that all was safe and got to his feet. But he kept his body low as he regained the trail toward the alley, and his tail stretched out behind. When he disappeared between two bushes, Mary followed him, but he had gone.

  It was unclear to her which of them had lost the other. Further along the path he still hadn’t reappeared, and she began to worry that he had simply tolerated her company until he could shake her off. Here the vegetation grew thickly, light greens snagging on dark, ivy and bindweed in a race to the light, and Mary stopped seeing the gate. The woods were full of the rub and squeak of birdsong. But there was no sound of him. All she could hear was the low churn of the basement conversion at the end of her road. They were creeping down Hazel Grove, those conversions, with their rolling and rinsing, their all-day, all-week drilling and digging, their conveyor belts shunting, for several hundred quid a cubic meter, apparently limitless earth.

  She could not say how she became aware of him—but one minute he was ahead of her, and now, magically, he was behind. Well, magic was just a word for things people don’t understand. His paws on the brittle leaves were as quiet as paws in snow, and his back and tail were elongated into one roll of muscle. “OK,” she whispered, crouching. “I understand. You’ve got a different plan. So share it.”

  He revolved on the spot, then headed under the canopy of two neighboring hazels whose branches had grown so tall that their weight pulled them horizontal, making a sheltered den between the two main trunks. He waited politely at the opening. Fallen hazel sticks covered the floor, crisp layers of old leaves, the dusty remains of catkins, an old yogurt pot. A thorn prickled Mary’s knee through her jogging bottoms as she crawled inside. The whole place smelt strongly of him, and the smell drew over her like a heavy skin. She submitted to its weight while he folded himself beside her. A hedgehog lay flat on the floor, with just its head intact: a sort of small decorative rug.

  Although she felt the immense affirmation of having made it to his home, now Mary looked around and saw the futility of their attempted, for want of a better word, elopement. It had taken her the whole journey to work it out, but he was not trying to escape, was he? If anything, he looked as if he was about to go to sleep. She had absolutely no power of control, or even barely of suggestion, over him. It had been madness to think she had. For a while, their two plans for the day had coincided, that was all.

  “Only one person here is running away,” she said.

  He looked up at her heavy sigh, and for his benefit she made an effort at cheer. His muzzle expressed perpetual benevolence: the black hairs sketching the line between upper and lower jaw were the side strokes of a crayon smile. “Wha
t would I do without you?” she said.

  She wondered if this was his main residence or if that would be the hole under the hazel. She was pretty sure her shed was a sort of summerhouse, an inside/outside space, as the property experts said. But this place was not an earth; it had no tunnels. It was more like a napping den. Maybe there were morning and afternoon napping dens, sunny ones and shady ones. A leaf fell from a nearby maple, and she watched his snout pursue its decline. When it landed, his shoulders relaxed, and he dug himself lower into the woodland floor.

  The den was filling with her scent. His snout twitched at sandalwood and Beetle, the expulsion of an egg giving her a peppery grind, a clear, salty yolk leaking—

  His warm tongue lapped at her arm. He was licking the ooze from her insect bite, and when he had finished, she reached round slowly so as not to alarm him and touched his back, fingers probing the cloak of thicker fur on his neck and shoulders. His hair was shorter than she had imagined, and beneath it the muscle relaxed and twitched against her touch in permanent tension. He had soothed her arm, and she found the act deeply touching. It was the kind of care she supposed he would take of a mate, and the thought made her look appreciatively around the space. In her garden, he was always the one to disappear, to bring their time to an end. If it didn’t sound so naff, she would call him Houdini. “What about Flight?” she asked. How silly that it had occurred to her only now to seek his opinion. “That would suit you, but it’s not very namey.”

  “I’m so glad I found you,” she said.

  The fur grew in bushy arches around the top of his eyes, and he seemed to adjust a brow.

  “All right. I’m so glad you found me,” she said, laughing. She let her hand explore the coarse coat of his back and heard a noise like a chirp.

  “I do love you,” she said.

  The marvel was, it was as easy to say as to think. She stroked him again, and her words spurred another chirp. It was a noise of pure happiness. He turned his muzzle to her, and she felt a weight on her knee. Looking down, she saw that he had rested his paw and was lying there, paw on knee, as if their arrangement were the most natural thing in the world. She felt her ribs, her stomach, her pelvis relax, as if some inner belt had unfastened. She was letting happiness loose.