Separating Reynard from his tail.
There was barking then, and shouting. Neither had run as long as the thin ribbon of blood that followed the fox out the front door. Neither had hurt as much as the wedding ring being torn from Aurora’s finger. Neither would be harder to forget than the corpse of her future lying cold on their Wedgwood platter.
The telephone jangles Aurora awake.
It takes her a minute to get her bearings. Images of Reynard’s betrayal slip like a veil from her mind. It’s morning, she tells herself, and bright. The disgusting smell of roasted chicken fades, replaced by the scent of clean sheets. Echoes of her husband’s nightly howling—his skulking below their bedroom window, snuffling and whimpering for forgiveness—are drowned out by the phone’s insistent ringing.
The tightness in her chest gets sharper as she reaches for the cordless receiver, rolling over the pillows stuffed in Reynard’s side of the bed. Poor imitations of his absent form. Pillows don’t throw their arms around her at night, don’t wake her with a hot tail pressed against her backside. They don’t make her feel safe.
Her throat constricts. They also don’t murder innocent lasses for jealousy.
“Rori?”
“Yeah.”
“Rori, it’s Ida-Belle. You gotta help me.” Her voice is pitched so high it could scrape paint off the ceiling.
“Just chop that rabbit up nice and small. Jimmy won’t notice a thing.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I done it already—and now I’m a fucking blimp! Ain’t no way even a fool like Jim won’t notice this. What am I supposed to do? He’s going to think I cheated on him, ain’t he? No way this thing in my guts is a one-day-old kid. I look like I’m ready to pop!”
“Hang on a sec, Ida.” Aurora sits up in bed, swings her legs over the side. “When did you eat that stew?”
“Jimmy takes supper at five.”
Aurora looks at the clock. Seven in the morning. Either Ellie’s got some powerful magics in her eggs, or else Ida-Belle is skimping on the truth. “Any way you might’ve ate more than your share of that rabbit? Did Jim get any at all?”
Silence.
“Out with it, girl.”
“Well,” Ida-Belle begins, “I really wanted to make sure it’d work, right?”
“Uh-huh . . .”
“So I started chopping up that first little bunny, and it were so much easier than I thought, so I said to myself, “If one’s good, don’t you reckon all three’ll be even better?” And—”
“And you put all of your chances into the stew. At once.”
Ida-Belle sniffles, her voice thick with tears. “Am I going to die?”
Aurora shoulders the receiver, pulls on a pair of jeans, tucks in the shirt she slept in. “No,” she says, taking her apron from the hook on the back of the bedroom door. She slips it around her neck. “You ain’t going to die.”
“But what am I going to do?”
“Quit your blubbering, for one thing.” Aurora gives the girl a chance to control herself. Grabs her fox-tail hat, plunges it onto her head. “I’ll have a word with the chooks, see what they’ve got to say about this situation. But if I was to have a guess, I’d say you should make way for triplets.”
“Oh God . . .” Ida-Belle’s tears pour out thick and fast.
“Hush now.” Aurora’s tone slips down an octave. Quiet and soothing; the same sing-song she’s used in the henhouse every day this week. “Come see me this afternoon, all right? And, this time, bring Jimmy.”
Ida-Belle can’t reply for crying.
“Hush,” Aurora repeats as she walks to the front door, propping it open with her foot. “We’ll sort something out, all right? All right?” She can sense, rather than hear, Ida-Belle’s nod. “That’s a girl. It’ll be fine, Ida. The lasses won’t let you down.”
Reynard would think this was a hoot, if he were here.
Ellie knew the girl would eat all three rabbits at once, and she didn’t say nothing about it. Probably reckoned she were doing Ida-Belle a favour. The whole thing makes Aurora feel tired, and she wishes her husband would put his fox-gloves on and work some trickery to lighten her mood.
But he ain’t here, she thinks. Right before she sees him.
He’s lying at the base of the oak tree they planted outside their bedroom window the year they got married. Morning sun is still low enough to hit him full on; the tree doesn’t provide much shade until late afternoon. His fur is mangy, streaked with red gashes, like he’s been on the wrong end of a fight. The stump of his tail is crusty with dirt and blood. More than a few flies buzz around him, alight on his eyes, in his ears, around the mess of his arse. Aurora’s heart races.
Oh, God. Don’t be dead.
She runs toward him, stops two feet away. Without going any closer she can see his face muscles twitch, like he’s winking at her in his sleep. With an effort, she turns back, crosses the packed-dirt yard and walks up the henhouse steps.
“Morning, chooks,” she says, and smiles to hear a chorus of greetings clucked from all sides, from both girl- and boy-faced lasses. Some, still not fully awake, stare vacantly at the moths fluttering up near the rafters. Others flap their wings for attention, bock-bocking demands for mints. Jolene and the twins avoid meeting her eyes as Valma looks on, disgusted; while yet others perform a waddling turn, point tails out, and doze off to pass the hours until feeding time.
Ellie, she notices upon reaching the aisle between rows P and Q, is one of the latter. Worn out from the effort of yesterday’s prediction, the Delaware hen is sleeping deeply.
“The mess, O-Rori,” chides a masculine-featured Cornish hen. From his berth in Q41, he stretches his head out to block Aurora’s path. His royal blue neck feathers, knotted beneath his bearded chin like an ascot, give him a regal air that suits the disdain in his voice. “Isn’t it high time you cleaned up this filth?” He peers over the top of his gold-framed spectacles, shudders at the mess still littering Minnie’s satin pillow.
“Honestly,” he says, now directing his gaze at his keeper, “preserving the scene of the crime in this fashion is downright macabre.” He sniffs. “And the fleas are becoming unbearable.”
Aurora looks across at Ellie, at Minnie’s soiled roost, then back at the sleeping oracle. I reckon letting her rest a few more minutes won’t hurt.
Adrenaline surges through her as her subconscious whispers, I reckon it’s time to move on.
She fetches a hand-broom and dustpan, fills a bucket with water, drops some soap and a couple old rags into her apron pockets. The pail clunks on the floor in front of Q42. Aurora hunches slightly to get a better view of the damage. Feathers, muck, and blood. A lump forms in the back of her throat. Straightening up, she tries to melt it by sucking on a Tic Tac—then has to dole out doses of the oval sweets to every open-mouthed bird from Q22 to Q57.
With most of the bay satiated, if not quiet, and the air sharp with the scent of mint, Aurora begins the task of sweeping away all trace of Minnie’s death. First, she removes the blanket; cleans off the pillow, sets it aside; then launches in with the broom. Bristles rasp across the bookshelf’s surface as she tackles the worst of the mess, moving as quickly as possible. Dirt, straw and down swirl into the dustpan’s waiting tray. While she works, Aurora’s eyes don’t stop watering.
“You’ve missed some,” the Cornish hen bosses. “Reach all the way to the back.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Aurora snaps. The insult she’d been about to unleash comes out as a strangled gasp as her broom snags on a clot of feathers. Dragging it to the shelf’s edge, she catches a glimpse of royal blue peeking out of the mass of red and white.
She picks up the egg with trembling fingers, brushes it off. It’s smaller than any of Minnie’s other fortunes, but still big enough for her to read the dedication clearly:
Aurora & Reynard Jenkins
Although the henhouse is as noisy as usual, to Aurora it seems the whole world has gone mute.
Why
is Reynard’s name on her egg? Minnie couldn’t have laid it on the fox’s last visit—sluggish with sedatives, she would have barely had time to struggle, to scream, before he’d slit her throat. Aurora places the egg on the shelf, leans it carefully against the Cornish’s cushioned roost. Staring at the bearded lass without really seeing him, Aurora realizes that Minnie must’ve laid it while Reynard had been throttling her.
While the two of them were too busy fighting to notice it.
“Get that flea-bitten thing away from me.” The hen’s foot connects with the egg, sends it over the shelf’s edge. As if in slow motion, Aurora watches the treasure sail earthwards, her hands clumsy and slow, swiping at empty air seconds too late.
A dark blue fault line splits the egg from top to tail as it cracks against the bucket’s rim, then bounces in with a splash. With a shriek.
Surrounded by shards of bobbing blue shell, a fox-faced hatchling cries as he fights to keep his head above water.
Oh, Minnie. Aurora’s eyes flood as she watches his baby wings weaken, his thrashing grow more frantic, his screams more shrill. Without moving, she waits to see if the newborn far-seer will resurface. Fair’s fair, ain’t it? The fox-hen gasps for breath, goes under again. And again.
Even is even.
Outside, Reynard whimpers, calls out for his wife. Just as he’s done every morning upon waking, finding himself tailless and trapped in animal form, bitten by flies and regret. Tailless and alone.
Life ain’t even, Aurora thinks. She knocks the pail over and its contents drown the henhouse floor. Leaning over, she rescues the sputtering lass. Uses a rag to pat his wings dry, then dabs at his cheeks with her fingertips. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
The chick sneezes. Opens his golden, Reynard-shaped eyes, and winks.
Aurora snorts. She pulls the fox-tail from her hatband, wraps the sodden oracle in its russet length. Holding the bundle close to her heart, she takes a deep breath. Gathers her nerve. Plans what she’s going to say to her husband, then slowly walks outside.
breathing bones
PETER CHIYKOWSKI
They say that the first instrument was a flute,
that thirty-five thousand years ago,
a man (and surely, they say, it was a man)
wrapped his hands around a hollow bone
and made the world young again
under his feet.
What a way to die,
breathing love into some bird’s dry wing-bone.
And what a way to be born, against all odds,
humming and cheating reciprocity,
giving without giving away.
Lungs without these bones are full
of stillborn songs. I smack
each breath on the bottom,
wishing it would scream or whimper
so I could rub its gleaming head.
the education of junior
number 12
MADELINE ASHBY
“You’re a self-replicating humanoid. vN.”
Javier always spoke Spanish the first few days. It was his clade’s default setting. “You have polymer-doped memristors in your skin, transmitting signal to the aerogel in your muscles from the graphene coral inside your skeleton. That part’s titanium. You with me, so far?”
Junior nodded. He plucked curiously at the clothes Javier had stolen from the balcony of a nearby condo. It took Javier three jumps, but eventually his fingers and toes learned how to grip the grey water piping. He’d take Junior there for practice, after the kid ate more and grew into the clothes. He was only toddler-sized, today. They’d holed up in a swank bamboo tree house positioned over an infinity pool outside La Jolla, and its floor was now littered with the remnants of an old GPS device that Javier had stripped off its plastic. His son sucked on the chipset.
“Your name is Junior,” Javier said. “When you grow up, you can call yourself whatever you want. You can name your own iterations however you want.”
“Iterations?”
“Babies. It happens if we eat too much. Buggy self-repair cycle—like cancer.”
Not for the first time, Javier felt grateful that his children were all born with an extensive vocabulary.
“You’re gonna spend the next couple of weeks with me, and I’ll show you how to get what you need. I’ve done this with all your brothers.”
“How many brothers?”
“Eleven.”
“Where are they now?”
Javier shrugged. “Around. I started in Nicaragua.”
“They look like you?”
“Exactly like me. Exactly like you.”
“If I see someone like you but he isn’t you, he’s my brother?”
“Maybe.” Javier opened up the last foil packet of vN electrolytes and held it out for Junior. Dutifully, his son began slurping. “There are lots of vN shells, and we all use the same operating system, but the API was distributed differently for each clade. So you’ll meet other vN who look like you, but that doesn’t mean they’re family. They won’t have our clade’s arboreal plugin.”
“You mean the jumping trick?”
“I mean the jumping trick. And this trick, too.”
Javier stretched one arm outside the treehouse. His skin fizzed pleasantly. He nodded at Junior to try. Soon his son was grinning and stretching his whole torso out the window and into the light, sticking out his tongue like Javier had seen human kids do with snow during cartoon Christmas specials.
“It’s called photosynthesis,” Javier told him a moment later. “Only our clade can do it.”
Junior nodded. He slowly withdrew the chipset from between his tiny lips. Gold smeared across them; his digestive fluids had made short work of the hardware. Javier would have to find more, soon.
“Why are we here?”
“In this treehouse?”
Junior shook his head. “Here.” He frowned. He was only two days old, and finding the right words for more nuanced concepts was still hard. “Alive.”
“Why do we exist?”
Junior nodded emphatically.
“Well, our clade was developed to—”
“No!” His son looked surprised at the vehemence of his own voice. He pushed on anyway. “vN. Why do vN exist at all?”
This latest iteration was definitely an improvement on the others. His other boys usually didn’t get to that question until at least a week went by. Javier almost wished this boy were the same. He’d have more time to come up with a better answer. After twelve children, he should have crafted the perfect response. He could have told his son that it was his own job to figure that out. He could have said it was different for everybody. He could have talked about the church, or the lawsuits, or even the failsafe. But the real answer was that they existed for the same reasons all technologies existed. To be used.
“Some very sick people thought the world was going to end,” Javier said. “We were supposed to help the humans left behind.”
The next day, Javier took him to a park. It was a key part of the training: meeting humans of different shapes, sizes, and colours. Learning how to play with them. Practising English. The human kids liked watching his kid jump. He could make it to the top of the slide in one leap.
“Again!” they cried. “Again!”
When the shadows stretched long and, Junior jumped up into the tree where Javier waited, and said: “I think I’m in love.”
Javier nodded at the playground below. “Which one?”
Junior pointed to a redheaded organic girl whose face was an explosion of freckles. She was all by herself under a tree, rolling a scroll reader against her little knee. She kept adjusting her position to get better shade.
“You’ve got a good eye,” Javier said.
As they watched, three older girls wandered over her way. They stood over her and nodded down at the reader. She backed up against the tree and tucked her chin down toward her chest. Way back in Javier’s stem code, red flags rose. He shaded Junior’s eyes.
“Don’t look.”
“Hey, give it back!”
“Don’t look, don’t look—” Javier saw one hand lash out, shut his eyes, curled himself around his struggling son. He heard a gasp for air. He heard crying. He felt sick. Any minute now the failsafe might engage, and his memory would begin to spontaneously self-corrupt. He had to stop their fight, before it killed him and his son.
“D-Dad—”
Javier jumped. His body knew where to go; he landed on the grass to the sound of startled shrieks and fumbled curse words. Slowly, he opened his eyes. One of the older girls still held the scroll reader aloft. Her arm hung there, refusing to come down, even as she started to back away. She looked about ten.
“Do y-you know w-what I am?”
“You’re a robot . . .” She sounded like she was going to cry. That was fine; tears didn’t set off the failsafe.
“You’re damn right I’m a robot.” He pointed up into the tree. “And if I don’t intervene right now, my kid will die.”
“I didn’t—”
“Is that what you want? You wanna kill my kid?”
She was really crying now. Her friends had tears in their eyes. She sniffled back a thick clot of snot. “No! We didn’t know! We didn’t see you!”
“That doesn’t matter. We’re everywhere, now. Our failsafes go off the moment we see one of you chimps start a fight. It’s called a social control mechanism. Look it up. And next time, keep your grubby little paws to yourself.”
One of her friends piped up: “You don’t have to be so mean—”
“Mean?” Javier watched her shrink under the weight of his gaze. “Mean is getting hit and not being able to fight back. And that’s something I’ve got in common with your little punching bag over here. So why don’t drag your knuckles somewhere else and give that some thought?”
The oldest girl threw the reader toward her victim with a weak underhand. “I don’t know why you’re acting so hurt,” she said, folding her arms and jiggling away. “You don’t even have real feelings.”
“Yeah, I don’t have real fat, either, tubby! Or real acne! Enjoy your teen years, querida!”
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 31