by Logan Jacobs
“The machine is supposed to look for worlds with humanoids,” I said. “It’s not a guarantee, we might end up in a lobster world anyway. I guess that’s why I ended up in your world, Fela.”
“I know you think I look like you, but with cat parts,” Fela smirked, “but to me you look like you’re one of mine, but with monkey ears. Maybe we’ll end up in more worlds with cat-folk instead of humans.”
“O brave new world, that has such people in it!” Emma dug the knife into the turkey’s pallid chest.
I could feel my stomach growl, so I popped a slice of parsnip into my mouth. I liked the unexpectedly sweet taste, like a carrot on steroids, but if Emma was going to roast the turkey the old-fashioned way I needed more to eat in the meantime. I glanced over to where the trout Emma had caught laid gutted and wrapped in a clean, damp rag. I’d watched along with Fela as Emma showed us how to gut and fillet the fish, so the hard part was over.
I also wanted to show Fela a little more of why humans had taken over our world.
“Hey, why don’t I build a fire, and we can cook the fish while we wait?” I suggested. “The turkey might take a few hours to finish cooking, but fish takes like, what, ten minutes?”
“Wait, wait.” Fela held up her hands at chest height with her palms out, and I wondered whether we had that gesture in common or whether she’d picked that up from me already. “I think I understand how you can build a cave out of melted sand, but how can you build a fire? Fire is not something you make with your hands...”
“Perhaps not you, my dear.” Emma held up her free hand and shot a small shower of sparks from the tips of her fingers. “I’ve always started my fires this way, but I’d rather like to see how Dave does it, and I’ve already got wood laid out in the oven. Did you bring a lighter or some lucifers, Dave?”
“Nope, I’m going to show you both how the very first humans did it,” I said. “Fela, will you hand me that knife I lent you? Just the knife, I don’t need the holster.”
Fela pulled the knife out of the holster, tilted her head as though she was considering something, drew her arm back over her shoulder, and flicked the knife blade-first into the parsnip in front of me.
I jumped back as the knife’s blade split the parsnip in half down the center.
“I did not mean to startle you.” Fela blinked slowly at me. “Show us the way you build a fire. Do you make a cave for it? Is that why you need the wood?”
“Uh, sort of.” I pulled the knife out of the table and parsnip, wiped the blade off on my shirt, then went over to the iron stone. I squatted down in front of the stove, tapped it to make sure that it wasn’t hot anymore, then pulled the little door in the belly of the stove open.
Emma had already stacked some split logs into the iron belly of the stove, and she’d even made a little pile of pale wood shavings on the bottom of the oven for kindling. Her fire looked a lot tighter and more practiced than mine, but I reminded myself that Emma had had a lifetime of fire-lighting, and I’d occasionally gone to a bonfire on a beach or in someone’s backyard where I paid a lot more attention to the beer and girls available than how to build the fire. Emma had a lot to teach me and Fela about not just how to survive in the wilderness, but how to thrive and be comfortable.
“Alright, check it out.” I grabbed the blade of the knife with my left hand, positioned it lengthwise above the small pile of kindling, pulled the flint out of my pocket with my right hand, then scraped the flint along the flat piece of the steel at the end.
White sparks flew up from the piece of flint and arced down toward the wood shavings. Most of the sparks burned out before they reached the kindling , but a few of them left tiny black marks on the pale wood shavings.
“Ohh,” Fela whispered into my ear. “It looks like magic.”
I looked behind me into Fela’s bright yellow eyes. The cat-woman had crept up to look over my shoulder without me hearing her.
“It’s not magic, just a special rock.” I held the knife and flint out to Fela. “Do you want to try?”
Fela took the knife and stone, held the blade out over the kindling, and scraped the edge of the flint against the flat piece of steel. Her scrape made an even bigger shower of sparks than mine had, and a few of the sparks glowed red when they landed on the wood shavings.
I bent forward and blew on the glowing embers as Fela scraped the flint along the steel, and before long a tiny orange flame popped up among the wood shavings.
“Fire,” Fela murmured, and she leaned forward and peered at the tiny flame. “I’ve never seen it this small or this close.”
“Keep blowing on it.” I demonstrated for her. “Short puffs, like this.’
“Well done, you two,” Emma said, and she pulled a handful of guts out of the turkey’s carcass and dumped the giblets into a tin bowl. “There’s a cast-iron pan in the cupboard you can use for the fish. I’m afraid I don’t have any lard, but the trout should be good enough in its own fat, and there are herbs and salt on the shelves.”
“I’m thinking just salt.” I grabbed a jar of white crystals off the shelves, unscrewed the cap, dipped my finger in, and licked the crystals off my finger to make sure they were salt. “Fela, I’d really like you to try some of the fish just to see if you like it, okay?”
“I will try it,” Fela conceded between breaths. Her bright yellow eyes barely wavered from the growing fire.
“Dave, I’d rather like to hear more about your world,” Emma said. She glanced behind her shoulder, smiled at me, and tucked a loose curl behind her ear with her clean hand. “What else do you have besides plays you can watch in your own house whenever you want, games you can play on a screen, and restaurants you can drive your carriage through?”
“Well, you know what a telephone is, right?” I went over to the cupboard and glanced around the tin flatware and beat-up pots for the right sized pan. “You pick up one end, you say hello, you can talk to anyone in the world who’s connected through the network.”
“I’ve read about them,” Emma said, “but of course I’ve never had a chance to use one.”
“We keep them in our pockets,” I said. “They have screens on them, too!”
“It seems that you put everything in your world on a screen,” Emma said. “Books as well, I suppose?”
“Yep, and books.” I grabbed a pan that looked about as big as the gutted trout, set it on the stove, picked up the rag-wrapped fish by the ends of its cloth, and slid the fish into the pan. “You can keep them on your phone if you want, too. And you can listen to music on it, watch plays on it, send letters to people... You can do pretty much everything you need to on the screen of a phone, actually.”
“Oh, really?” Emma giggled as she rooted around in the turkey. Her hand was covered in blood and turkey guts up to her wrist, but somehow that only made the already domestic scene a little more real, or maybe I just had a thing for girls with someone else’s blood on them. “Can you even go courting on a phone?”
“You can, actually!” I laughed. I scooped a little coarse salt out of the jar with my left hand and started to sprinkle it over the trout. “What you do is you take a picture of yourself, write a little bit about your personality and the kind of person you’re looking for, and then just kind of put it out there. Then you get to look through other people’s pictures and blurbs and see if you like them, and if you both like each other, you meet for a date and hook up.”
“It sounds just like the personal advertisements in newspapers,” Emma said. “Is that how most people meet their sweethearts in your world?”
“I mean, I guess you can go out to bars or clubs,” I said. “Or game nights. But honestly, it’s a lot easier to just go on a dating app and see who’s around. Plus, you get a chance to see what the person you’re interested in is like before you ever talk to them, so you don’t accidentally ask out someone who’s already taken, or a white supremacist, or three kids in a trench coat.”
“Three baby goats in a coat!” Emma g
iggled as she rinsed her hands under the tap. “That really is too much. I bet you court all sorts of women over your phone, Dave.”
“Eh...” I shrugged to buy time while I tried to come up with a way to answer that wasn’t a lie but wouldn’t make me look like a loser or too much of a man-whore. I didn’t think I had a bad sex life or anything, I just hadn’t had anything like a serious girlfriend since my freshman year of high school, and that was only because I’d been fourteen and completely convinced that a girl who liked novels about telepathic dragons just as much as I did had to be my soulmate. It turned out that a shared interest in dragons wasn’t enough to sustain a serious relationship for long, though. “I’ve definitely courted a few girls before, but the relationships never really went anywhere. I guess we just decided that we weren’t right for each other before anything got serious. But that’s the risk you take when you date people sometimes, you know? Not everyone is going to be right for you.”
“So you don’t have a sweetheart right now?” Emma leaned against the wooden counter and dried off her hands on a rag. Her blue eyes slid from me to Fela and back again.
“I, uh...” I glanced at Fela, but she just tilted her head and curled her tail behind her like a question mark. I’d been flirting pretty hard with the cat-woman, and she’d referred to me as part of her pack, but we hadn’t exactly had that conversation about our relationship status. I wasn’t even willing to say that we were at “It’s Complicated” yet.
“There aren’t any girls out there who’ll be heartbroken if I don’t come back, if that’s what you’re asking,” I finally said.
“Hm.” Emma tilted her head to the side as if she was considering something, then opened the cupboard, pulled out a cast-iron roasting pan, and set it on the wooden counter next to the sink. “Fela, what about you?”
“I did not leave a mate behind, either.” Fela rose from her crouch, holstered her knife, and handed the piece of flint back to me. Her fingers brushed mine as she dropped the gray stone back into my lap, and a frisson of arousal went through me in spite of the sharpness of her long claws. Or maybe because of them. “I think the fire is as built as it will get inside its metal cave.”
“Shut the little door, then, dear.” Emma gestured at the open door of the iron stove. “We don’t want to let the fire out. How do men and women court each other in your world, Fela?”
“Well, first the male bites the female on the neck,” Fela began as she shut the stove door, “and then if she is in heat, she will get on all fours and her tail will curl up and allow him to side his--”
“I didn’t quite m-m-mean that!” Emma interrupted. She set the turkey in the roasting pan. “I meant, how do you choose your mates in your world?”
“Yeah, you talked about a pack earlier.” I stuck the flint back into my pocket. “How does that work for you? Is it like a big family with a mom and a dad and a bunch of kids, or like... one male with a lot of females?”
“Like the Mormons?” Emma giggled as she scooped the sliced parsnips into the roasting pan.
“I do not know what a Mormon is.” Fela crossed the kitchen toward the window in a few long strides. Her tail brushed against my leg as she passed, even though she didn’t look back at me. She looked out the window at Floppy, gave her mammoth a little wave, and leaned against the wall with her leather-wrapped arms crossed over her round, full breasts. “But you are correct on both counts. My pack used to consist of my father, my mothers, and my sisters. My father would mate with my mothers to make my sisters--”
“Oh, my,” Emma murmured as she pulled a wooden bowl of Brussels sprouts out of the cupboard. She started to arrange the sprouts around the parsnips. “Did you not even know who your own mother was?”
“Yes, she fed me at her own breast,” Fela sighed. “Of course I know. My other mothers were my aunties, because their daughters were my sisters. I do not think that they were all my mother’s breeding sisters, but they treated all of us like our daughters once we stopped drinking milk. So I call them my mothers, too.”
“So, uh, what happened to your brothers?” I asked, and I winked at Emma. “Did they get sent off on mission trips or something?”
Fela stared out the window for a few seconds before she spoke.
“They did not live for long after they were born,” she finally said.
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
“My condolences, dear.” Emma murmured as she sprinkled salt over the contents of the roasting pan.
“My father was the only male in the pack, and he liked it that way,” Fela continued. ”Some of my sisters left to find new packs to join as they got older, but me and many of my sisters stayed and helped our mothers raise the new daughters. I stayed until our father died.”
“Oh, I’m so--” Emma began, but Fela held up her hand.
“It happens,” Fela said. “He died in his sleep instead of being trampled by the woolly rhinos he liked to hunt, and he outlived most of his women except for three. My mothers cried and yowled for days. They would not go out to help me and my sisters find another male so we could all make more cubs.”
“Just one male for all of you?” I asked. “Really?
“Only one is needed,” Fela shrugged. “It is the tradition that all the women in the pack go out to find a male together, because he will be the mate to all of them, and they must agree on the male they choose. But a few of my sisters decided to trick us. They told us that they were going out to hunt fern-birds together, but they came back with a young male instead.”
“Was that the pack dispute you talked about?” I asked.
“Yes. That was the pack dispute.” Fela nodded. “They had not consulted with the rest of us, and just went out and recruited the first male they could find instead. He would not go out to hunt. He would keep his favorite mothers back in the cave with him, even if they were needed for hunting. When he stayed in the cave instead, he would not make tools or watch cubs when he was not mating, but would lounge around on furs all day. When we brought prey home, he would gorge himself until he threw up everything in his stomach, like a wolf, and then he would gorge himself again! Some of my sisters did not care, because they had a male around, and that was all that mattered, but some of us did not want him as our mate. We did not think that he would make good cubs for us. I was lucky that he did not want to mate with a Smallfang, but I heard from the mothers who mated with him that he was cruel even to the ones he favored.”
“Yeah, he sounds like a jerk,” I agreed.
“What happened?” Emma slid the roasting pan into the oven. “Did you oust the rake?”
“Too many of my sisters were willing to keep him in the cave.” Fela shook her head. “They did not think they would ever find another male of breeding age again before they grew too old to make more cubs. I did not want to fight my sisters, and I could not break their hearts by killing him--although if I had decided to do it, it would have been easy. He slept so soundly that I could have driven my spear through his head during his nap, but my sisters would have cried and yowled as my mothers had, and I did not wish to hear that sound. I left instead. I thought I would eventually find another pack that would welcome me, or a lone male who would be willing to have a Smallfang as his mate, but I did not.”
“I can’t imagine a guy who wouldn’t want you as his mate, Fela,” I blurted out.
“I appreciate your compliment.” Fela raised an eyebrow. “There is one thing that confuses me about your courting and your hook-ups and your Mormons that I think you did not explain. I know that the bear-folk choose one mate and stay with them for life, and the monkey-folk mate with whoever they choose whenever they choose. How do you structure your packs--when you are not mating with the only survivors around, that is?”
“I suppose that’s really the important question, isn’t it?” Emma asked. She held her chin high and glanced sideways at me from under her long black lashes. “My Mama told me that great-grandmama courted a few boys before she decided to
settle down with my great-grandpapa, and that they stood together before the pastor and their family and declared that they would be true to each other in the eyes of the Lord, and that nothing should ever come between them. Mama didn’t see the need to do such a thing, because it was only going to be her and Papa anyway, but she also said that if another man or woman happened along some day and they needed family, then she wasn’t going to say no as long as they were all in accord. I always thought that made sense, since love is love and everyone needs it as sure as plants need sun and water..”
“Yeah, they do,” I agreed. My heart beat a little faster at the thought that Emma and Fela might not mind it after all if I decided to “court the both of them,” to use Emma’s term. Emma was definitely in need of a family, and Fela wanted a pack. Maybe I could have that Little Playboy Mansion on the Prairie after all. “That’s a great philosophy, Emma.”
“And how do humans mate when they have their choice, Dave Meyer?” Fela’s voice was so low and husky that it sounded like a purr. Her pupils widened as she blinked her brilliant yellow eyes slowly at me.
“Well, that’s the fun thing about humans,” I began. I could hear the trout starting to sizzle behind me, so I took a beat-up metal spatula out of the cupboard and went to poke at the fish. “We don’t really have just one way of mating. Most humans spend time getting to know another person one-on-one before they agree to be mates so that they know if they like the other person enough to mate with them for life or not, instead of just getting together in a pack to evaluate them like your mothers did. A lot of humans decide to spend their life with one person, but that’s not for everyone.”
“Yes, King Solomon had seven hundred wives, and he’s even in the Bible!” Emma chirped. “The Lord didn’t have a problem with that at all.”
“You keep talking about this Lord like I should know who it is.” Fela tilted her head to one side. “And what is the Bible?”