by S. M. Beiko
I tore through my drawers, flinging tops and undershirts at the fox named Sil as I struggled into my jeans.
“Where are you going?” she half barked, shaking her head free from an Achievement Unlocked T-shirt.
I pulled a plain long-sleeved tunic over my head and shoved my arms into a button-up shirt. “You know my name, you know where I live. I’m clearly not an adult. You’d think you’d know it’s a weekday and that I have school.”
Sil darted a frantic half-circle around my feet, trying to stall me. “School is the least of your troubles. There are dire things that need to be addressed.”
I sidestepped her and lurched to the door. I steadied myself and took as much of a power-stance as possible, feeling like crumpling as I did. “Look. I’ve read enough epic-quest hero books that, in the unlikely event that I was tapped for some crazy mission like the one you and the giant butterfly of death —”
“Moth.”
“— moth . . . were keen on discussing over my corpse, I promised myself I’d go for it, no questions asked. Throw in some talking animals, and why not? Orphaned teenager with an infuriating fox-familiar, seems a solid premise. But,” and I counted off the obstacles on my fingers, “I’ve got provincial exam prep, a threadbare social life, and a diploma to get. It’s a Friday. The quest can wait.”
Sil huffed but kept silent. I snatched my hoodie from the hook on the back of the door, then checked my extremely dishevelled self in the mirror. Usually I’d be slightly bummed that I hadn’t any fashion sense, or really any style to speak of. Today, I shrugged, because it could be worse. I could be dead.
I whirled on Sil with an afterthought. “Oh, and don’t even think about leaving this room. Deidre leaves after I do, but Arnas is home all day. If he catches you nosing around, he’ll be calling pest control in five seconds flat.”
I held the door, about to slam it shut, but with a rush of red and heat, Sil forced the door wide open and out of my hand. It cracked on its hinges and seemed slightly singed as it bounced off the wall. I cringed, the fox staring up at me and into my soul.
“This isn’t some penny dreadful, or some game your fragile human mind has conjured,” her voice was thick and harsh in the back of her throat, a rising snarl. “And if you value the life I’ve stolen back for you, you will not tell me what to do.”
She launched down the hall in a sonic flare, and I jumped back at the heat of her, her afterimage burned into my eyes. I jerked after her, unsure I should even give chase after a threat like that. But I figured she was still a wild animal and if she was caught in this house, we’d both be dead.
“Wait!” I shout-whispered, careening around the corner, down the stairs, and straight into the kitchen. Luckily Deidre had her back to me when I realized I could feel the air whooshing against my fresh eye, uncovered as it suddenly was. The sensation brought me up short and made me forget the chase. I clapped a hand over the new eye, unsure how Deidre would react. I didn’t have time to think up a valid reason as to why my years-long affliction was suddenly cured, so I wrenched the fridge door open and hid my face as she turned from her smartphone to greet me.
“There you are, lazy bones! Didn’t your alarm go off?”
I aimlessly shifted through the jars of pickles and cocktail onions. “Er. No, I guess I forgot to set it.” Yeah, too busy hanging in the spirit realm to do that, srs business.
“Oh. Well . . .” I caught a glance of Deidre looking forlornly out the kitchen window and into the backyard. She cleared her throat. “Now, honey, I don’t want you to be upset . . .”
I sifted through the cheeses, only half listening. Man, we have a lot of cheese. I weighed one in my palm. I couldn’t keep this up for long.
“Roan, could you just look at me? I want you to come over here for a sec.”
I knew she wanted to talk about the stone fox and try to console me, but I had bigger fish to fry than some busted up statuary from my childhood. “I, uh, one sec, I just need to find that leftover pasta salad so I can take it for lunch —”
“Why’s the fridge door open?” said Arnas’s pinched voice. Before I could stop him, he’d shut it, and we were face to face. My mouth clamped shut, and I balled my fists, holding off the urge to slap a palm over my left eye.
Arnas stared in disbelief. He hadn’t looked hard at me in months, but now he saw me, stared directly into my golden eye, and his face drained of blood frantically trying to make it back to his heart. Suddenly I saw two Arnases: the one standing in front of me, and another one beyond it, overlapping him like a negative, a dark thing reaching around him and consuming him. Betrayal. Shame. These words emerged from nothing and rattled around my head. And something else; something small and swift and frightened. A rabbit. Huge ears and a twitching nose superimposed over his face. I couldn’t tell you what made me think of it, but it was there, and I suppressed a nervous laugh.
Deidre’s voice made the world come carouselling back into focus, and I winced, a pain I’d never felt before entering my eye as my hand shot up to it.
“What’s the matter? Roan, are you —” She spun me around and I let her. She covered her mouth. “Oh my — Roan, your . . . your eye!”
I glanced at Arnas, who was still frozen behind me, and I tried to get as far away from him as I could in the small space. “Yeah, I . . . I just woke up and rinsed it out, and — ta da?”
“But this is incredible!” Deidre crooned, snatching my chin and forcing my face into the light. I shook her off. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it this healthy looking! Oh honey, this is wonderful. How’s your vision? I can’t believe this! I’ll make an appointment for a follow-up but . . . I’m just blown away.”
“Yeah . . .” I said, scratching my cheek and trying to change the subject. I just wanted to get out of here. “What’d you want to show me, Deedee?”
“Oh.” That thankfully brought her back down to Earth. “Well, I . . . I’m sorry, honey. The house alarm didn’t go off, and I didn’t hear anything last night, so I don’t know what happened but —” She steered me to the kitchen window, pointing towards the ruined fox to let the scene speak for itself. All it did was make me nervous, because running around somewhere in this house was a live fox with a sharp tongue who could incinerate us all on a whim. A fox that had been born from the rubble of a statue I’d played with my entire life. A fox come for me with a quest in her teeth. Or maybe that was just part of the dream . . .
“Oh that’s . . . that’s too bad.” I turned away quickly. “You’re sure you didn’t hear anything last night? Nothing?”
“Sorry, love.” She shrugged. “I sleep like the dead.”
Ugh, don’t say that. “Did you hear anything in the house, though?” I pressed, remembering the guttering torrent of moths, the oaths of what could have been gods going head-to-head, and the fire . . .
“You don’t think someone was trying to break in, do you?” She looked to Arnas for support but, as usual, he was leaving quickly with his coffee. I could’ve sworn he looked slightly traumatized.
I shook my head, pulling on my winter gear mechanically, legs getting their stamina back. I tried to reassure Deidre. “No, no. Maybe I was just . . . dreaming.” I wish. I hoisted my bag onto my back, pulled up my face mask, and dropped my goggles down.
“Well, I’m sorry about the statue, Roan. I know what it means to you. We can talk about it later, if you want. I can also look into getting it fixed. Maybe we should get the alarm system checked. Hm. Oh, and I’ll make that doctor’s appointment!” Good ol’ Deedee, already springing into action. Then she stepped back, appraising me. “You sure you don’t want a ride? You look like you’re going snowmobiling. On Hoth.”
I shrugged. Four layers, long underwear, jeans, two pairs of socks, two hoods, face mask, touque, parka, gloves, ski goggles. This was my armour against the prairie subarctic. Though now, I admitted, I felt extremely warm, as thou
gh I could shed one or five layers and face minus forty naked.
“I could use the air,” I said instead, my words muffled as I waved and tore out the door, grabbing my bike and heading for the roads. Luckily the plows had been out, and as I pedalled hard, I exhaled, setting myself free into the speed and the wind and the cold. I felt alive. And I suddenly understood that it was a terrible, fragile thing to feel.
*
Arnas peers between the slats of his office blinds, watching his niece pedal up the road. He lets go with a snap, running a shaking hand over his mouth. He’s still dizzy, but that’s a symptom of the shock, so he eases into his desk chair, recording each creak of the leather and plastic to keep his mind from collapsing.
He thought it would be over by now. The last piece moved across the board, as it had been planned all these years. Unless — unless . . .
Bending his head forward, almost reverently, he pulls free the chain hanging around his neck, and with it, the key. His hands keep still long enough for him to unlock the desk drawer, slide it open, look down into it, and to enjoy the momentary relief that washes over him like a hit of nicotine.
Arnas’s slender-fingered hand wraps around the object rolling at the bottom of the drawer. He pushes it to his chest as hard as he can, trying to absorb it into his body, trying to make himself feel anything radiating from it. He swears that it’s still warm, that there is still power left in this tiny, remnant husk, but he doesn’t hold out much hope that it could be his for long. He rocks back and forth and nearly chokes when his wife knocks at the door, asking him something he’s already tuned out.
“I’m f-fine,” he stammers at a half shriek, entire body coiled around his layered fists. Her footsteps retreat, defeated. They’ve barely spoken a civil word in the last year, all because of the tension that has kept Arnas so tightly wound, gazing long around corners, holing himself up behind locked doors. He loves Deidre, he does. And he has loved her enough not to involve her in this, as much as he ever could. But this house was haunted with power and secrets and the reminder of his failures long before they moved in.
And the girl. His niece. Arnas folds himself inward a degree deeper, feeling his fists bruise his bones, an inchoate sob squeezing out through a tight mouth as the shame rises. He looked into her eyes this morning and knew that she had seen into parts of him that he would never name out loud. He knows he isn’t ready to do what he’ll be called to do. And the call would come very soon.
The relief of weeping allows him to take a breath, to unravel and sit back, even though his hands stay clasped. Like petals, his fingers bloom out, revealing the small, wrinkled thing, the last of his family’s power. And he thinks, Things would’ve been so much easier if she’d stayed dead.
*
Our exchange had started with me sidling up to an unassuming Phae, whispering loudly, “Can I talk to you?” though now it had boiled down to me batting her hands away from my newly minted eye.
“I just don’t understand,” Phae muttered, frowning. This was what usually constituted excitement for her, however left-brained restrained it was, so I let her have it.
“Neither do I!” I finally grabbed both her hands and held them at her sides. “Listen, I know your family is Hindu, so you’ve got a sort of window into . . . the ancient spiritual, I guess. But yeah, it’s just that . . . I think I had some kind of, um, experience, last night, and I’m not really sure what to do about it. Not even really sure if it’s ‘spiritual’ — more like ‘supernatural.’”
Phae just stared as I worked through this. A group of passing boys sniggered and jeered “Get a room!” at us, since I’d locked Phae in an intimate pose. Instead of letting go, I whipped my head around, snarling and hoping my new eye could shoot fire.
“How about I get you a room and call it your grave?” I barked.
Faces falling, the boys retreated to their lockers, mumbling something about being a Cyclops lesbian — as if that was the worst thing in the world to be. Besides, the Cyclops part was an obsolete insult now.
I finally let go of Phae. “Well that escalated quickly,” she said, almost reverently. “Must’ve been some spiritual experience you had.”
I did usually ignore verbal abuse, but today of all days I wasn’t about to endure it. I slouched against the bank of lockers, rubbing my forehead. “You have no idea.” She clicked her locker shut, appraising me with a new level of concern that I didn’t think possible.
But I looked up at her with my mismatched eyes, and figured, Why not, she’s my best friend (only friend?), and I’ve told her everything already and she still sticks by me, so why stop now?
I swallowed. “Phae, I think I died last night.”
Her shoulders lifted and she sighed. “Oh boy.”
By the time we’d climbed up from the basement and were hustling to our first class, caught in the undertow of hundreds of students, I’d spilled it all. The eyeball-borne moth tornado, the huge queen they served (who was basically Death itself), a talking fox that had followed me home and had turned out to be an enormous fire-engulfed spirit guide, and now a golden eye that was seeing Thumper in the face of the uncle I barely knew.
“And the fox — Sil, she said her name was — she’s still running around loose in the house. If Deedee or Arnas find her ripping up the trash, I am so dead. Not to mention what’ll happen if she decides to go all pyro again and burn down my grandmother’s creepy house.” We were momentarily separated by some A/V kids wheeling an overhead projector down the hall. When we converged again, Phae seemed to be getting farther away, even though she was shoulder to shoulder with me.
“Were you taking some new kind of antibiotic?” she asked, frowning still and not looking at me. She was trying to puzzle me out, like a Rubik’s cube. “I mean, that would explain the infection clearing up so suddenly, and maybe there were residual, hallucinogenic side effects that your body wasn’t accustomed to . . .”
I could tell I’d already lost her, probably at the talking fox. Or, well, pretty much anything that happened last night could be shrugged off as a bad NyQuil trip. But I pressed on. “Phae, I told you, I just woke up like this! And I thought — hoped — it had been a wacky dream, too, except there was a fox on my bed who told me otherwise!”
I probably wasn’t improving my case. We’d arrived at the AP English room, and before I could go on, Phae rested a heavy, fine-boned hand on my shoulder. “Roan, you are my best friend,” she said, “and I’m not about to tell you what you experienced wasn’t real, because it seems very real to you.” I felt the tension in my face increasing; I had sensed the but coming from a mile away: “But, because I’m your best friend, and I want to support you in any way I can, I feel that if you see this ‘fox’ again —” her air quotes were painful “— you should really talk to a, uh, maybe a professional about it? That’s not to say that I don’t want you to come to me, because I really, really do. But this might be something physical, too. I mean, the nerves in your eye are all very intimately linked to neurological processes, and there may have been some serious damage there . . .”
My body sagged, the fake smile making as good a cameo as ever, however weak it was. “Hey, forget about it.” I shrugged, trying to laugh it off a bit, backpedalling. “It’s crazy. Too crazy to be true. It probably just . . . has to do with the eye. Yeah. Probably that.”
At this point, lying seemed easier. It got a twitched upper lip out of Phae, but I had a feeling we were both being frauds, doing our best to console one another over my sudden psychotic breakdown, both failing miserably.
We took our seats. For the first time in years I was consciously brushing my wayward hair out of my face, unafraid of what people would see underneath it, almost excited to see what they’d say. It drew stares, mostly, along with whispers and people elbowing each other, nodding in my direction. This was more jarring than I’d expected — everyone had probably adjusted to the eye patches,
or grown bored of the usual jibes, but I don’t think they were prepared for the flash of amber that had been hidden beneath all this time. Maybe I should’ve sent out a press release? A Facebook status? (Not that I even had a Facebook account, but still.)
I realized all too quickly that, no matter what I did, I was still the same weirdo. So I just stared straight ahead, wishing I’d taken Sil up on her offer to stay at home today, and longing for my eye patch as I smoothed the hair protectively back in place.
Then the classroom door opened, with the teacher, Mrs. Mills, holding it ajar for the wheelchair-bound boy who followed her. I’d seen him in passing, climbing the school’s steep concrete ramps with improbable strength in his lean arms. His hair was trimmed in a fade close to his dark skin, and his glasses always snuck down the sweaty bridge of his nose after long bouts of navigating the dense crowds clogging up the hallways. Just as I thought of it, he pushed his glasses against his face, parking himself next to the teacher as she introduced him. Barton Allen, moving up into AP English since, like a lot of us, he’d be doing the International Baccalaureate program, early prep for university next year. Nothing too exciting, though I still sat up to get a good look, like everyone else. I was happy for anything that took the attention off me.
Then he looked straight at me, and it happened again.
This time, the jolt to my body was more powerful than when I’d looked at Arnas this morning, so jarring that I felt like my bones were trying to fuse with my desk as I held on to it for dear life. The room swam and shadows leapt out at me, darting from my periphery and racing in the air. Then the shadows became shapes, grew legs: they were rabbits, enormous ones, fleeing something bloody and out of reach. Whatever it was struck out, cleaving the legs out from under one of the rabbits and sending its bloody body to rest on the hard-packed earth — on the tiled floor? — or both, maybe. So much blood, but the rabbit was breathing, legless and alive, wild eyes racing, finding mine —
I shot out of my seat, grasping this new, however malfunctioning eye with both hands and nearly doubling over from the pain rocketing through my head. The shadows and the rabbits and the blood were gone (had they been there at all?), and I was left hunched over, trying to remember how to produce oxygen. I had to get out of there. The teacher stared, the students gaped, and I even caught Phae coming out of her seat and reaching for me, but I was out of the classroom and far away from them all before I could even register my flight response.