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TigerTails Radio Season 13 Episode 14 Join the Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/SQ5QuRf For a full preview of events and for previous episodes, please visit http://www.tigertailsradio.co.uk. See website for full breakdown of song credits, which is usually updated shortly after the show.

by Joanna Galbraith

“Word spreads quickly about the Festival di Notte and every animal in Florence is cordially invited.”

In the Florentine hills below Fiesole, where the land is quilted with olive groves and stitched with high stone walls, where every house has dark green shutters and facades of yellow yolk; there lives the rooster of Villa di Notte who crows throughout the day.

Lustily squawking as he struts his stuff, no one understands him apart from the chickens.

‘Hush,’ they coo as he begins to crow. ‘Today he begins the Seventh Circle of Hell.’

It is the rooster’s dream to reach Paradiso; His father only made it as far as Purgatorio.

Sometimes the villa dog comes down to listen; scratching his back on the dry stone wall. He cannot follow what the rooster says (for like most dogs he does not speak Fowl) but he enjoys the camaraderie that comes with each show. Even the olives stop growing when the old rooster crows.

Now this dog is a proud fellow with a thick Shepherd’s mane. Eyes like two toffees: brown, melting stones. His name is Palmerino. He wishes it were not.

‘Oh to be a Leonardo, a Michelangelo, a great Cesare. Anything would be better than such a limp Palmerino.’

‘You should be grateful,’ scolds the plump villa cat. She speaks perfect Hound. She can speak Wild Boar, too.  ‘I am called cat. Nothing fancy about that.’

Sadly, the inhabitants of Villa di Notte do not sense Palmerino’s despair. They think his pout looks like a smile, his grimace just a grin. They think he likes to hear his name. They shout it all the time.

‘Don’t be hurt,’ consoles the cat. ‘They don’t mean to be unkind.  Besides, you know how little they understand about their villa world.’

Palmerino nods at the cat’s prudent words: he knows that she is right. How can they know about his name when they know so little else? Like how their sheep play Blind Man’s Bluff amongst the cypress trees or how their goats enjoy pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey although the donkey is far less keen!

Or how their chickens are so erudite, their rooster so verbose.

And that they have a cat with more tongues than lives and a dog with a lofty dream. A dream that extends far beyond his name — a dream to reach the sky. To stand up high on his own hind legs and walk a steady mile.  To shake the paws of all his friends instead of sniffing bums. Not that he minds the sniffing part (he quite likes it truth be told) but he knows it lacks sophistication; it just isn’t how it’s done.

‘Yes indeed,’ sighs Palmerino to himself. ‘How can they know I need a more gallant name if I am to walk upon my hind?’

* * *

As it turns out Palmerino is not the only dog who wishes he stood tall. The dark stone streets are full of such creatures, hankering to drink their morning espressos from tiny porcelain cups or to lean, cross-legged, at Trippa Bars while swallowing down their lunch. Each animal is proud of their Florentine home – of their city’s glorious pedigree. They know of the Renaissance from a time gone by.  They dream of the Renaissance still to come; a rebirth of sorts for all animal kind when the light from their souls will finally shine.  A time when they will at last create.  A time that has not yet come.

They are patient though, these aspiring artists, as they wait for their beautiful day.  For they know how simple human folk really are (despite their invention of algebra) and how dangerous this can be.  Just look what happened to the poor Russian bears that tried to stand before their time; strapped into skates, dressed in pink tutus, condemned to circus life.

No. These Florentine animals will not make this mistake. They are content to wait until the time is right and steal any opportunities that they can.

Like Sunday nights at Bar Café Mingo where they meet to exchange ideas. Owned by a Perugian with a heart spun from silk, he lends his key to a wolfhound called Basso without a single word. He understands that these animals need to meet. Need to express their animal souls. He doesn’t even mind the muddy prints they leave around his cups or that occasionally an enthusiastic tail may break a glass — for so too can a careless arm

Now here in Bar Café Mingo all the animals come to stand upon their hinds. There are the cats who paint with their motley paws and the Arctic Hares who throw clay pots. There are the dogs with a penchant for archeology who bring in their latest digs and the sculpting frogs that spend their days in mud perfecting the animal form. There are the Beatnik goats clapping out their rhythms; the spiders weaving tapestries.  All celebrating together in a small Oltrano bar while the Florentines peacefully sleep.

Palmerino is a regular; he is good friends with Basso, but the villa cat she never comes.  She much prefers to stay at home and enjoy the open air. Besides her father was a rather famous poet who used to cause trouble in the bar. Not for his poems (though somewhat provocative in themselves); he was an alcoholic too. The cat is afraid of what a whiskey and cream might do to her as well.

‘So how was last night?’ she asks Palmerino whenever Monday morning rolls round again.

‘Wonderful. A flock of migrating geese dropped by and honked in a capella Holst’s – Mars, The Bringer of War. Can you imagine? Then they sang a piece which they had composed themselves during their long flight south. Quite spectacular really.’

‘I wish I could have heard it,’ sighs the cat wistfully, resting her head on her well-groomed paws.

‘You really should come to the bar some time.’

The cat shakes her head; the memory of her inebriated father swinging from bar room shutters is still too raw for her.

‘It’s a shame we can’t do something away from the bar. In the open air perhaps.’

‘Like a festival?’

Palmerino furrows his brow. ‘Yes, exactly.’

‘A festival would need a lot of space.’

‘There’s plenty of room out here.’

The cat shakes her head again. Visions of skating bears flash through her mind. ‘Oh no, the villa folk are kindly people, but they would never understand.’

Palmerino pouts.

‘Unless,’ muses the cat with a thump in her tail. ‘Unless we wait until the Dolomites.’

‘The Dolomites?’

The cat rolls her eyes. Sometimes Palmerino can be very slow.

‘You know when the villa folk go to the Dolomites. They do it every year.’

Palmerino’s tail begins to wag. Of course, the Dolomites! Ever year the villa folk go to the mountains for five days. Normally they take him when they go on holidays but never to the Dolomites. Apparently one of their Aunts is allergic to his fur and she makes a lot of fuss.

‘I shall announce it next Sunday,’ shouts Palmerino in great glee.

The cat raises a paw to the front of his nose.

‘Ssh my excitable friend, not so fast!  At least let me find out first when the Dolomites will be.’

* * *

Word spreads quickly about the Festival di Notte and every animal in Florence is cordially invited.  Even the castorino who live down by the Arno and are known for their less than salubrious smell!

‘There is plenty of room,’ Palmerino enthuses to the bar crowd. ‘Olive groves, hay barns, a swimming hole as well. We shall walk, we shall dance, we shall touch the moon with our paws.’

Both he and the villa cat work tirelessly to prepare. They arrange with the pigeons to string up fairy lights; they speak with the mosquitoes about humming Habanera.  A horse chef is invited to whip up delicious treats although she cannot make them by herself as her shoes are far too awkward.  Instead she employs some local rats with nifty, little hands to work as sous chefs in her stable kitchen; to follow what she says. She also invites a herd of local bulls to come toss great salads in the air and a family of squirrels come in to crack nuts and unscrew jam jar lids.

* * *

Finally, the day comes when the villa folk are to leave.  Palmerino slumps glumly while they pack their bags – just as any loyal dog should always do!

‘Not too glumly’ hisses the villa cat. ‘They might take you after all.’

Immediately Palmerino starts smiling instead. He trots to the car with a wag in his tail and watches, head tilted, until the car pulls away.

‘Now,’ he whoops joyously. ‘Let the festival begin.’

Soon the animals start arriving in droves, flocks and herds. Dogs walk gaily, paw-in-paw, hind-upon-hind, musing wisely about the speed of light.

‘Well of course the neutrino can go much faster. I have tested it myself.’

Pigs don party frocks spun by spiders. Chickens count eggs before their laid. The ducks perform Swan Lake to rapturous applause.  Champagne spills over and flutes are broken. They prove too delicate for animal hands.  But the shards are soon melted down and blown into glass jewels by a troupe of fireflies.

By the third night the entire villa is in disarray, but it is a delightful sort of chaos. The lady dogs are wearing waistcoats; the men are in high heels. A fox has come up with a new kind of trot. A frog has learned to jive. The rooster has finally reached Paradiso; he plans to tackle William Shakespeare next.

Palmerino watches with a puffed out chest. He feels so tall he can reach the moon.

‘It’s a success,’ he barks joyously to his fellow host.

‘Aye,’ replies the villa cat who has been learning Scottish from a highland cow.

Suddenly, however, a bright light shines down the road.  Two flying saucers is the first supposition, but alas it is something far more alarming than this. The villa folk. Returning early? Apparently the allergic aunt found a stray dog hair in her soup.

The cat quickly ushers the animals out the back gate while Palmerino slumps frozen in his spot. His head is slung low though his heart is undefeated.

The villa folk cannot believe their eyes. Their house, their garden an unspeakable sight.  Smashed up plant pots everywhere, spilt vats of wine, trodden in food, sagging grape vines. Sculptures made of cow manure. Intricate mosaics designed out of seeds. A woven tapestry of wild, blooming flowers. Remnants of equations scratched out on barn walls.

They search for poor Palmerino with his innocent, brown eyes.

‘Aw come here,’ they say kindly while ruffling his sticky head. ‘Fancy being caught up in such terrible chaos. Such terrible vandalismo! Brave doggy, good doggy let us give you a bath.’

And Palmerino is bathed and groomed and fed though nothing feels as good as standing on hind legs.

* * *

The following morning Palmerino wakes from a kaleidoscopic dream and ventures out into the garden. Everything has gone. Nothing remains. In the field burns a giant bonfire, almost touching the sun.

‘Next year Palmerino’ the villa folk say. ‘You will come to the Dolomites with us.’

And Palmerino pouts though they think it’s a grin.

‘O don’t be sad,’ consoles the villa cat. ‘They don’t mean to be unkind. Besides you know how little they understand about their villa world.’

 

* * *

Originally published in Stupefying Stories

About the Author

Joanna Galbraith (she/her) was born in Australia but currently lives in Tuscany with her two cats – Pirate and Dalmazio. She has written about singing fish, humming whales, and dancing polar bears as well as the occasional story about vengeful dustbins and eight-fingered snowflake spinners. Her work has been published in numerous publications, including the highly-acclaimed Clockwork Phoenix anthology series.

by Diana A. Hart

“According to the President, we’re just animals. And thanks to his Supernatural Registration Act, I’d been downgraded from NOAA researcher to Park Service mascot.”

The squeals of the horde grew closer. I pulled in a breath, thick with wood and old newsprint, and reared onto my hind legs. My knees ached as I staggered to the center of the room. Standing upright was a breeze as a woman, but I was in bear-form, and grizzlies sure as hell aren’t meant to walk that way. My muzzle wrinkled as I pawed my wide-brimmed hat into place and braced for impact.

A pack of first-graders rounded the corner, flapping coloring books and screeching like howler monkeys on espresso. I snorted. They made a beeline for the menagerie of stuffed wildlife that lined the visitor center walls. Somehow the National Park Service expected coarse rope and a burnt wood “Do Not Touch” sign to stem the tide. It never worked. I cleared my throat as the grade-school piranhas reached for their taxidermied victims. The horde turned toward me, and eyes and mouths went wide.

A girl with mussed hair and a Last Unicorn t-shirt raised a chubby finger. “It’s—”

“That’s right,” I said. Well, rumbled, really. Being a grizzly kind of screws your “inside voice.” I jabbed a paw at them. “Remember, kids: Only you can prevent forest fires.”

A collective screech hit my ears. I winced and then they were on me. Most were well behaved, content to bounce up and down and jabber at me as if I were some woodland Santa Claus, but there’s always those few who mistake me for a jungle gym. By the time Kelsi and the chaperones arrived, a pair of boys clung to my shoulders and somebody dangled from my ruff. Their prim, proper, perfectly human teacher just laughed and took pictures.

I clenched my jaw and glowered at the woman. Her heavily moussed curls showed no signs of abuse, and her dress was shoeprint-free. Oh no, her little angels wouldn’t dare treat a normie like this, but shifters? A boy stuck his finger in my nose. I sneezed and wrestled him off my shoulder and plopped him on the floor. According to the President, we’re just animals. And thanks to his Supernatural Registration Act, I’d been downgraded from NOAA researcher to Park Service mascot.

The remaining shoulder-percher tried to steal my hat. Cooing over his cuteness, one of the chaperones blinded me with a camera flash. My pulse rose. I slapped a paw on top of my hat and weighed mentioning they were technically photographing a topless woman. I knew from experience it’d stop the pictures. I also knew it shrank my paycheck.

Instead I bit my tongue and locked eyes with Kelsi. The humanoid, five-foot-six raccoon had a child wrapped around each leg and her Stetson hung akimbo. My brow creased. What the heck is it with kids and hats? She shook her head and mouthed “Get on with it.”

I took a deep breath and bellowed over the din, “Do you know what the number-one cause of forest fires is, Ranger Rick?”

One of Kelsi’s leg-limpets wiped his nose on her calf. Her tail puffed from irritated to “just-shoot-me-now.”

“I dunno, Smokey,” she said, sticking to the godawful script.

I put a paw on my hip and frowned. It didn’t take much acting. My knees were screaming. “Well, that’s no good.” I flashed a sharp-toothed grin at the pair still yanking my fur. Their faces paled. “Do you know?” They just slid to the floor. My muscles unknotted. Finally. I rolled my shoulders and turned to the horde. “Can anybody tell Ranger Rick the number-one cause of fires?”

All of the kids babbled their guesses, including a shrill cry of “dragons.” My smile turned just a bit real.

The teacher finally settled her class in neat, cross-legged rows so Kelsi and I could give our presentation on fire safety, conservation, and how feeding the bears got people mauled. I’d done the routine so many times my brain just clicked to autopilot and let me watch the crowd during our show. Usually when Kelsi started juggling cans and tossing them in a recycle bin, the kids’ attention would drift, but every once in a while, you’d get that one child whose gaze stayed bright, boring into us with a hungry fire. Most wanted to be Rangers or scientists. Others were happy just seeing fellow shifters flash fur after the Registry.

My shoulders slumped. Today was just window-gazers and coloring enthusiasts.

* * *

After the Hoh Visitor’s Center closed, I shifted back to human form. Having thumbs and an athletic build was a welcome change from “nature’s tank.” I traded oversized trousers for human garb, grabbed my gear from my locker, and dashed for the trail, my grizzly-brown locks whipping in the wind. I grinned as the air kissed my face. There were a few hours of daylight left, enough to take some readings of the river if I hurried.

By the time I reached my favorite spot — a fast-flowing curve of water, shielded from intrusion by a steep hike and moss-covered hemlocks — the light had faded to a pale orange blush. Looming night and the glacier-fed river chilled the summer air. Goosebumps spread over my skin as I crunched along the gravel bar. A goldfinch sang somewhere along the far bank and the scent of evergreens and wet earth flooded my senses. My muscles relaxed as nature’s perfume washed away memories of pulled fur, sticky fingers, and painfully boring scripts.

I headed for a fire-downed hemlock. The charred tree was over a hundred feet long, trailing through the woods, across the bank, and into the river. I set my pack beside the dead giant and admired its blanket of ferns and spindly saplings. My breath slowed in quiet awe. Even in death the trees give life. Snags like this one allowed fresh growth and, when they dipped into the water, sheltered fish and other aquatic fauna. It was the latter I was really interested in.

I pulled out a flow meter and stake, then waded into the river. Liquid ice hit my calves. I gasped. Good money said it was about fifty degrees, but I’d check that last. My brain didn’t need any help on the “this stuff will give you hypothermia” front. I waded mid-stream, teeth chattering.

“You should be watching around you, Lily,” a deep voice rumbled. I clutched my chest and wheeled toward the sound. A black grizzly sat at the end of the snag, camouflaged by the tangle of branches, munching a trout as the water churned about his belly. He fixed me with moss-green eyes. “Dangerous, startling bears.”

“Jesus, Michail!” I said. My heart was stuck on ‘seizuring rabbit.’ “What are you doing here?”

His brow furrowed. “I was missing you,” he said, Russian accent deepening his rumble.

My chest squeezed. It’s been, what, three weeks? Four? Long enough I couldn’t remember. Guilt bowed my shoulders. I knew he couldn’t come by the visitor’s center — dodging the Registry had ended that years ago — so on my days off I was supposed to hike up Mount Tom Creek and meet him at our arch. I buried my face in my palm. “I’m sorry. It’s fieldtrip season…” The excuse tasted sour, yet I kept babbling. “They’re splitting my days off and I had to get readings before—”

Michail clicked his tongue. “Lyubov moya, no apologies for your research.” I heard the lip-curl in his voice. “You are more than carnival exhibit.”

I lifted my chin. “That’s Interpretive Ranger, thank you.” I was aiming for offended, but judging by the tilt of Michail’s head, I’d landed somewhere between ‘pouty’ and ‘pitiful.’ My lips tightened. Great. He dropped his trout and waded toward me. Double great. I averted my eyes and drove the flow meter’s stake into the riverbed. The last thing I needed right now was distraction and Michail was delightfully good at that.

“Lily.”

I attached a temperature probe to the post. “Bit busy, Michail.”

Small waves lapped my waist. His muzzle slid under my jaw in a cool caress. Eau de wet fur spiced the air. Most people would find the odor off-putting, but when you can turn into a bear — and have shared god remembers how many showers with one — it’s comforting. Homey, even. I inhaled despite myself.

“Zoloste.” His voice vibrated my bones. “I worry for you.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. This script was as familiar as my Smokey routine. He would start with “I escaped Motherland, fled Soviet persecution,” then move on to “Registry is seed of American tyranny,” and finish with another plea for me to join him as a nature-preserve-nudist. My chest lurched. Would it really be that bad? Wandering the mists, plucking fish straight from the rivers, dew settling on our fur in the mornings… I huffed and skipped to the end of our verbal dance.

“Running tells the normies harassment works. Makes it harder for the next shifter.” Checking my cables one last time, I slogged out of the river, shivering as wet clothes clung to my skin. Michail strode after me. “Besides.” I turned around and shrugged. “Playing Smokey earns brownie points, means Park Manager Dawson publishes my data.” Bitterness clung to my tongue. These days it was the only way I could get something in print.

Michail frowned. Well, as much as a grizzly can, anyway. “Appeasement only means you are on knees when knife comes out.”

My mouth went dry. I put my hand on my hip, as much to banish fear as to halt protest. “Did you come to argue with me or what?”

His jaw tightened. “…no.” Michail never liked backing down but after a few years and a couple of bear-brawls, he’d learned to let things drop. Still, it took a few seconds for his gaze to cool from ‘pissed’ to ‘smolder.’ He grinned. Paced closer. “There are better things to do.”

I laughed as he loomed over me. Lord, don’t let a hiker see us now. They’d think Michail was attacking and jump in to save me. “You’re terrible,” I said. “I have to take readings, remember?”

Hot breath brushed my neck. Water dripped on my skin in cool contrast. “As you Americans say, ‘all work and no play’…”

“You could help, medved,” I said and swatted his nose. “Make it go faster.”

He rolled his eyes playfully. “If I must.” A hearty shake sent water everywhere. I squeaked and threw my hands up.

Michail grimaced as the shift began. Soft pops of bone echoed over the river’s churn. Midnight fur gave way to rosy skin, exquisitely toned muscles steaming with shift-fever. His muzzle shortened and twisted back to the square jaw and high cheekbones I’d loved to trace in the mornings. Fading scratches and a thin new scar granted him a feral look.

I didn’t gape. Just… flushed more than I cared to admit.

Michail let out a whoosh of air and brushed back now-untamed hair. Warmth lurched through me. While I was stunned, he leaned in for a kiss. His tongue still carried the light, gamey tang of fish. Our lips parted, and he gently hooked my chin. “You were staring again, zoloste.” Hot-faced, I sputtered some excuse, but he just laughed and headed for my backpack.

While he rummaged through my gear, I touched my lips and rolled the taste of fish in my mouth. My eyes narrowed. Cutthroat trout? The sneak knew it was my favorite. He was tempting me, reminding me what civilization lacked. I crossed my arms. I wasn’t sure if I should beam or growl.

Michail produced my battered notebook. “I will record data for you, yes?” he said, leafing through the pages

I let my arms drop. It was too nice a night, the company too pretty, to stay stressed. “Yeah. Sure.”

He turned around and took up a wide-footed stance. A rakish grin left no doubt that the view was intentional. “So,” he said, twirling a pen. “Where is it you want it?”

* * *

Dawn brought crisp air and cold rain. Soaked and breathing hard, I jogged into the dingy locker room and threw my pack on the bench. Currently human, Kelsi peeked around her locker door. Minus raccoon-gray hair and mottled eyebrows, she reminded me of an Octoberfest ad: econo-sized bosoms, ample curves, and a smile that could heatstroke a penguin.

“Decided to camp out, huh?” she said.

I mumbled an affirmative and spun my lock.

“Hold still.” Kelsi plucked a leaf from my hair. “You brought a souvenir.”

Heat crept up my neck. Traces of Michail’s bear musk clung to my skin. Add in twiggy locks and any shifter with a decent nose would know exactly what I’d been up to. Still, Kelsi didn’t cock an eyebrow or anything. Either she had the best poker face ever — unlikely, given her delighted squeals during Uno — or she had the nose of a normie.

Acting as if nothing was amiss, I opened my dented locker. “Just getting some early readings.”

“You should have taken longer,” she said and pulled up her sweater. Fabric muffled her voice. “Missed the first bus.”

“The job’s not that bad,” I said. Water dripped from my nose. A quick puff blew it away. “Free park admission, free uniform…” I pulled out my oversized pair of trousers. “Well, part of one, anyway.”

“It’d be better if the kids gave a crap,” Kelsi said and traded pants for short-shorts. Ranger Rick was always drawn commando, but she’d talked Dawson into letting her keep some semblance of dignity. “If I were you, I’d take a gig at the zoo.”

I paused. “…what?”

“Yeah, Woodland Zoo? They pay shifters to hang out in the enclosures.” She plopped her Stetson on her head. “If I wasn’t a hybrid-form, I’d do it. Put some glass between me and the little monsters.”

I nodded to the clock over the door. “The ones here in seven minutes?”

Kelsi’s eyes widened. “Crap!” She threw on her vest and the scent of raccoon filled the air. A pained gasp escaped as her tailbone popped and stretched to four feet of plume. Fur in place, she dashed into the darkened visitor’s center, shouting “I have to get the coloring books ready!”

I wasn’t expected to lay out activities for the kids, bears lacking thumbs and all, but I still hastily peeled off my clothes. When the kids arrived I needed to be in place with my back to a wall. Walking through the visitor center only turned the horde into piggy-back-hungry velociraptors. I waded into my pants and summoned the change.

An inferno swept through my blood, turning it to a furnace. Pain sledgehammered me into an ursine shape. Once the heat and shakiness faded, I lumbered for the door, claws clicking on the tile. A draft made me stop. Uh oh. I peered down. Sure enough, I’d forgotten to close my fly. I lolled my head back. Having thumbs would save my dignity but a wardrobe adjustment wasn’t worth shifting to human and back.

“Kelsi?” I called. Turns out swallowing pride makes your ears droop. “I need a zip.”

The next few hours continued to slide into what we called ‘retirement impetus:’ no eager learners, Q&A mostly focused on if we pooped in the woods, somebody turned our six point buck into a five-and-a-half, and a rug-rat spilled apple juice on me.

During a lull I went to the bathroom, pawed the water on, and wasted a tree’s worth of paper towels trying to get clean. All I really accomplished was soaking the front of my trousers. I grumbled and swatted the faucet shut. No kids, Smokey just gets super excited putting out fires!

Padding back into the visitor’s center, a wave of newsprint-scented air hit me. Gun-oil and fear came with it.

Ice whispered up my spine. Appeasement only means you are on knees when knife comes out. Pushing back Michail’s warning, I snuffled the air, certain there was a less-paranoid explanation. Dawson’s cologne teased my nose. I loped toward the scent, taxidermy animals staring after me with dead eyes.

Three Law Enforcement Rangers waited in the lobby. The trio projected that ‘everything’s under control’ vibe, but the tightness of their jaws told a different story. Dawson, back military straight, talked with Kelsi in a low and furtive tone. Her eyes were wide and her tail tucked.

I cleared my throat. “Everything okay?”

They turned. Worry darkened Kelsi’s gaze. Dawson’s was a flat, cold gray.

“There’s been an attack,” she squeaked.

“Hikers, near Mount Tom Creek,” Dawson said. His grip tightened on a Ziploc full of rags. Even sealed, I whiffed blood and grizzly. My throat constricted. Michail.

“Casualties?” I asked.

“One dead, two injured.”

My pulse thudded in my ears. He had to have a reason. “What happened?”

Dawson shook his head. “Group stepped off the trail, black bear charged them—”

“Grizzly,” one of the guards interrupted. “Said it was nine feet when it reared.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. My insides were a leaden mass. “There’re no grizzlies in the Olympics.”

“And Lily was here all morning,” Kelsi said quickly.

Dawson sniffed. “Misjudged size in the confusion. Standard fear response.” He took off his Stetson and rubbed his buzz cut. “Still. Bear that’ll attack people. . .” His unspoken intent roared in my ears. It needs to be put down. Nausea washed over me. Dawson kept talking. “When the next class comes, escort them on and off the bus and keep them in the visitor’s center.”

“What’s your plan?” I asked, voice shaking. Hopefully they would misread my concern and think I was fretting over the visitors.

“For now we’re closing the trail and escorting hikers to safer areas.” He waggled the bag of rags. “In the meantime, we’ve asked local hunters to bring their dogs.”

Bile filled my throat. Dogs. My legs ached, screamed with the need to run and find Michail before the law did. They’re bringing dogs. If I could just talk to him, let him explain, we might be able to convince Dawson that the attack had been provoked, an act of self-preservation. But if the dogs found him first—

“Lily.” Dawson put a hand on my shoulder. I jerked. “Until we bag this thing, no more readings, okay?” he said, trying to give me a little shake. Didn’t work. I was over eight hundred pounds. “We can’t lose Smokey.”

I nodded. Inside I was growling. “Yeah. Sure.”

* * *

Branches whipped my face as I ran. Rain pounded my Gore-Tex and roared in my ears. My pulse was louder. He has to be there. I kept running, lungs burning as I dodged roots and night-shrouded trees. Being a shifter let me see in the dark, but with hunters on the way I had to stay human, dulling my senses. Still, my nose was sharp enough so I could smell Michail.

His trail, sweet, musky, and male, twined along Mount Tom Creek, quickly eroding in the rain. A coppery tang knotted my gut. Blood. Shifters were spectacular healers, able to close most wounds in a few days, but we could still bleed to death. And in this storm there was no telling how much Michail had lost. I scrambled upstream, fear lancing my heart.

He has to be there.

A pair of familiar hemlocks loomed in the night. I let out a sobbing, foggy breath. The ancient trees straddled the water, undercut by the river ages ago, but instead of toppling into the currents they’d fallen against each other, their combined strength resisting the elements until time had fused them together. Branches reached as one for the sky while conjoined roots formed a slight shelter. I spied Michail inside the ancient tangle, hunkered over in human form.

“Michail!” I called, staggering closer.

His head snapped up. Pain rasped his voice. “Lily?”

I ducked under the roots, frigid water pouring into my shoes. Blood-tang filled my nose. Michail sat on a tangle of driftwood clutching a denuded, gore-coated stick. An unusual pallor haunted his skin.

His brow wrinkled. “Lyubov moya, why—”

“I smelled you on those hiker’s clothes,” I said. My throat constricted. There were… holes in him. On his side. His back. In the dark they wept black.

“Poachers, zoloste,” he hissed and dug the stick into a hip wound. I yelped and darted for the branch. A flash of metal stopped me. Michail held up the deformed slug, fingers stained. “Thought I was a prize black-bear.” He flicked the bullet into the gurgling stream. “Mudak.”

I swallowed bile. Self-defense. They’d tried to shoot him, and he’d fought back. I threw my arms around him, shaking. It was self-defense. “We have to get you to the Ranger’s Station.” From there we could summon a doctor, call the police—

“No.”

The word hit like a punch. I pulled back. “What?”

“I go back, my name is in Registry as bear.”

Temper warmed my blood. I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Damn it, Michail! You’re not running from Stalin anymore!”

“Chernenko,” Michail corrected. He shrugged. Winced. “And doesn’t matter. Judge says innocent, someone always says guilty. They find me by Registry and…” He put his fingers to his head and mimed a gunshot.

My jaw dropped. “People aren’t like that!”

Michail’s eyes narrowed. “Zoloste.  My father died for raising me Orthodox.” His words were sharp as a blade. “Because friends told Special Committee.” He set aside his stick and twined his bloodied fingers in mine. “Poachers will demand bear. Vengeance.” He squeezed. “You must come, run to Mount Tom.”

I pulled loose and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Michail, I can’t—” He lolled his head back and started to rumble. It died with a wince. My retort withered on my tongue. I touched his arm and waited while he expelled the pain in short, foggy bursts.

“What’s wrong?” I asked once he’d regained composure. Stupid question, really, but my brain was still rebooting.

“Shoulder,” he said, resting against a gargantuan root. It was the same one he’d carved our initials into years ago. “Cannot reach.”

My lips tightened. “Turn around.”

Moving gingerly, Michail presented his well-muscled shoulder. I pushed back my hood and leaned in close, fighting nausea as I gently manipulated savaged flesh. At least he’s human now. Translational injury would leave the bullet a centimeter or two below the skin, rather than inches deep in a bear’s beefy shoulder.

“They will never respect you, Zoloste.”

Dawson’s voice rang in my ears. We can’t lose Smokey. “I know,” I murmured. “But that’s not why I stay.”

Metal glistened in the wound. I fished the hunk out with the stick, Michail’s fists clenched the whole time, and flicked the bullet aside. I slid off the root, bark catching my jeans, and scrubbed my hands in the frigid stream. Michail just watched with sad, tired eyes.

“Then why?” he asked.

As I sat in the dark with blood on my clothes, the answer seemed… weak. And so very faraway. I took a deep breath. “Not everyone can run. Some of those kids—”

A howl drifted through the woods. My breath caught. Dogs. I whipped around. Michail was no fool. He’d already gotten to his feet, scanning the trees with narrowed eyes. “One, maybe one-and-half kilometers,” he said.

My chest squeezed. Not his first man hunt. I touched his cheek. Stubble pricked my fingers. “Dawson brought hunters.” My voice shook. “Go. The rain…” Stones filled my throat, but I choked them down. “The rain’ll wash out your trail.”

He grabbed my arm, nails lengthening into points. “No.” He nodded to my stained Gore-Tex. “Blood all over you. Dogs will come to you.”

“I know.” I flashed a smile I didn’t feel. “But they’re hunting a bear, right? Not like they’ll shoot a human.” Please, please God let that be true.

Michail’s grip constricted, his nails puncturing my jacket. Fear and anger warred in his eyes. I held my breath. Another howl rang in the distance. He grimaced and squeezed his eyes shut. His fingers fell from my arm. “Chert voz’mi,” he whispered. He leaned in and kissed me deeply. This time I tasted only him. “Spring, if hunt is over…”

I rested my forehead against his. Pain raked my heart. “…I’ll meet you here.”

He breathed into my hair. Kissed the top of my head. Fur sprouted from his skin, and he stepped into the river, using the water to hide his trail. I caught a whiff of fresh grizzly and then he was gone, swallowed up by rain and night.

Tears burned down my cheeks. “Run fast, medved.” I sniffed and wiped an arm across my face. It just smeared mud and bark everywhere.

Shivering, I waited and listened to the dogs. Their tone grew excited. Frenetic. Let them get right on top of you. I’d get only one chance, and the rain would strip Michail’s scent fast. I shucked my coat and picked up the gore-coated stick. Then I’d better leave a big damn trail.

Downstream, a flashlight winked between the trees. My pulse quickened. They’re here.

I leapt from the shelter, dragging my blood-stained coat behind me. Rain hit like cold, hard bullets. I ran into the wind and up a ridge, jumped over roots and crashed through every fern and huckleberry, lashing the foliage with Michail’s surgery-stick. By God, if those dogs couldn’t follow this mess they were useless.

Bays soon turned to keening barks. Branches snapped as the hounds gained behind me. My heart lurched. Not yet! I veered down a steep slope. Adrenaline surged through my body and spurred me on like some sort of daredevil mountain goat. I gasped for air. Wet dog hit my nose.

A huge mutt angled into my path, teeth flashing. I yelped and changed course. In my panic I smacked into a tree. I went ass-over-tea-kettle, bouncing off rocks and plowing down saplings, until my leg caught a boulder. Something crunched and pain exploded across my senses.

I screamed. Or vomited. Not sure which, but something definitely came out.

Agony throbbed through me, kept me on the ground until the hounds came. Hot breath and warm noses snuffled over me. One mutt kept barking in my ear. I just kept my eyes shut and gritted my teeth against the pain until somebody shined a flashlight in my face.

“Holy shit,” Dawson said. I groaned and blocked the glare, squinting between my fingers. His jaw hung slack. “Lily?”

* * *

While Kelsi juggled and sang to the kids about recycling, I sat in my own personal hell, claws twitching as I endured the twelfth day of Itch-toberfest. Dawson wasn’t able to replace Smokey and I needed to eat, so I’d agreed to heal up as a grizzly and had the cast applied in bear-form. I stifled a whimper. Stupid move, really. Fur took the itching from ‘torture’ to ‘Circle of Hell,’ and my painkillers weren’t doing squat. My ears flattened. The only plus to it all was that Dawson and the hunters had dragged me back to the visitor’s center, cancelling the hunt until an ambulance showed.

I glanced out the visitor’s center window, slumping like a fern in the rain. Hope you’re in better shape, Michail. It’d be another five months before I knew. A Law Enforcement Ranger, reeking of cheap cologne and gun-oil, loitered by the stuffed deer, examining Kelsi’s glue-job. I sighed and held up a recycling bin, doing my best to ignore him. And that’s if I can ditch my escort.

When Dawson had asked how I’d wound up in the woods covered in blood, I’d made something up about not having readings during heavy rainfall, slipping out, and running into the ‘Big Bad Bear.’ She’d been a mother with cubs, bloodied by her earlier run-in with the ‘hikers,’ so she’d attacked and chased me until I’d crashed down the hill and broke my leg. I stifled a huff. Dawson smells a rat, though. Officially Ranger Cheap-Cologne or one of his buddies were here so I didn’t sneak off and get hurt again, but a twenty-four-hour-shadow was less ‘caring’ and more ‘surveillance.’ Doubly so when you added in cold glances and high-caliber side arms. The whole affair had left me with whiplash; I’d been looking over my shoulder constantly and Michail’s warnings haunted me like perpetual swansong.

Kelsi pitched her cans into my bin one by one, punctuating her act. A few kids clapped. The rest popped up despite the protest of the teacher and swarmed me to croon get-betters and sign my cast with crayons.

“Aw, thank you, kids.” I wriggled in my seat, trying to relieve my aching rump. Turns out bear-butts aren’t designed to sit on wood crates all day. Who knew?

A girl with orange and black hair shouldered through the crowd. A faint scent of tiger wafted from her, spicy and sharp. Her yellow eyes were bright. “Miss Smokey,” she said.

The weight on my shoulders lifted. Finally.

“Smokey’s a boy, Whiskers,” one of the kids snapped.

Tiger-girl put her hands on her hips and shot them a withering glare. “Smokey’s a boar. She’s clearly a sow.”

“That’s right,” I said, surprise creeping into my voice. She knows her animal terms. I smiled and cocked my head. “Did you have a question?”

She nodded. “Well, you said fires were bad, but—”

A blonde boy, tall for his age, stopped signing my cast. His face pinched as he studied me. “You’re a shifter?” Disgust marinated every syllable. He flicked his head toward tiger-girl. “Like her?”

My muzzle wrinkled. How do you think I’m talking, kiddo? “Yeah . . . And?”

Kelsi shook a bag of candy and shouted over the buzz. “Who can name a native fish?” Chocolate proved more exciting than talking bears. The locusts moved to Kelsi, squealing ‘pink-eye salmon’ and other imaginary species. Only tiger-girl remained, glowering down at her sandals and clenching her coloring book, knuckles white.

My chest squeezed. God, how many times had I been in the same position? At her age I’d wanted to run away, hide from it all like Michail. Stones filled my gut. Of course she doesn’t have that choice. Tigers weren’t exactly local wildlife. “What’s your name?” I asked.

She sniffed and glanced at me. “…Antimony.”

“So, Antimony, what was this about fires?”

Dark clouds faded from her vision, letting some sparkle back in. “Well, Douglas-firs and fireweed need fire for their babies to grow…” That was an oversimplification, but she was in what, fourth grade? I nodded. Her posture slowly straightened. “And different animals need them for food and homes, right?”

“Correct.”

Antimony’s brow furrowed. “So fires are good.” She frowned and chewed her lip. “Well, sometimes.”

“That’s true,” I said, voice upbeat. “In fact, that’s part of my research.”

Her mouth formed a tiny little ‘O.’ “Shifters can do that?”

Hearing her disbelief, the raw strength of it, made my throat constrict. “Of course!” I leaned in conspiratorially and braced my paws on my knees. Bad move, really. Fresh pain shot through my leg. I grimaced. Antimony’s eyebrows rose, but thankfully she didn’t change the topic. I let out a slow breath and transferred all my weight to the other knee. “Some people told me that I can’t do research, or that because I’m a shifter it won’t go anywhere, but you know what?”

Antimony leaned closer, voice dropping to a whisper. “What?”

“I do it anyway.”

Her lips twitched with the start of a smile. She jabbed a thumb toward the rest of her class. “So when they say I can’t be a scientist ’cause I’m a shifter…?”

I plopped the Stetson on her head. It seemed the right thing to do. Kids were obsessed with that hat. “You can be anything, Antimony, fur or not.”

She grinned so big I caught a glimpse of fangs. Pain, sweet and sharp, filled my heart and washed away the days until spring. I smiled too. This, Michail… this is why I stay.

 

* * *

Originally published in Writers of the Future

About the Author

Diana A. Hart lives in Washington State, speaks fluent dog, and escapes whenever somebody leaves the gate open—if lost, she can be found rolling dice at her friendly local game store. Her passion for storytelling stems from a well-used library card and years immersed in the oral traditions of the Navajo. She was previously published in Writers of the Future, Vol. 34.

Follow her on Twitter: @ DianaAHart

by Eleanor R. Wood

“You’re not here, but it smells of you, somewhere under the stone where I can’t follow.”

1.) The tree fort your friend built, that you so longed to play in, but instead only visited once. When you realized I couldn’t climb up and play too, you never went back. I marked it for us anyway.

2.) The shallow creek, where we splashed and cooled off in summer. Your smooth feet would slip on the rocks. When you fell and cut your chin that time, I licked it better.

3.) The wide open space of the park, where you’d throw the frisbee over and over and I’d bring it back to you again and again until we both fell, laughing and panting, to the damp grass.

4.) The school gate, where I was never allowed to follow, but had only to wait, senses quivering, until the surge of exiting humans narrowed to the blessed single point of the only one who mattered to me. Your delightful ruffling of my ears… the taste of your cheek, mingled with all the scents of the day.

5.) The woods, with their squirrel trails and muddy puddles so good to drink from. You always pulled me away, but if only you’d just tried a sip, once, you’d have known the rich flavors of the forest as I did.

6.) Your bunk bed, low enough for me to leap up with a scrabble of back feet so I could snuggle up with you and rest. I don’t remember when the resting stopped being only at night, but I still loved to curl up to you even when the sun blazed bright outside and the Mother tsked at me when she came in and out with strong-smelling drinks.

7.) The house, where we were supposed to only be together, until the time you stopped being there with me and so did everyone else and it was quiet and your scent was faint and my heart thumped with loneliness.

8.) The cold corridors that smelled strongly of the stuff that only came out if I had an accident indoors, where the Mother held my lead tightly and strangers smiled or frowned at me and then suddenly you were there, in a bed I’d never seen, and I leapt up and you threw your oddly weak arms around me and my whole body wriggled with how much I’d missed you.

9.) The house, again, alone.

10.) The place where grass grows and dying flowers lie, shorn from life, against smooth stone slabs in rows and rows. You’re not here, but it smells of you, somewhere under the stone where I can’t follow. The Mother cries when we come here. I cry too, because I don’t know how to find you.

11.) The fort, the creek, the park, the gate, the woods, the bed, the house. I go to them, because they are ours. I go to them because maybe, one day, you will be there again.

 

* * *

About the Author

Eleanor R. Wood’s stories have appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, Diabolical Plots, PodCastle, Nature: Futures, The Best of British Fantasy 2019, and various anthologies, among other places. She writes and eats licorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, two marvelous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee.

She blogs at creativepanoply.wordpress.com and tweets @erwrites.

by Aimee Ogden

“Before he learned to shift, he also would have said he could never love a bird. But here he is, and so is she.”

Lincoln is in the kitchen smearing peanut butter onto the last few crackers in the box, the ones that are chipped and cracked but still salvageable. He clicks the knife hard against the edges of the peanut butter jar, crinkles the cracker sleeves too, but he can still hear his mom crying upstairs, and Aunt Jen’s voice raised in counterpoint. He slams the cupboard door and for a moment there’s just the crash of wood on wood in his ears and not the noise from above.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair that he has to pretend nothing’s wrong while one big long parade of wrongness marches up and down the stairs and through the hallways of his house twelve times a day. Mom came home to die and everyone wants Lincoln to act like she might just come waltzing down into the kitchen tomorrow morning to make everyone pancakes and complain about Congress.

There’s a thunder of footsteps on the staircase, but when he glances up hopefully, it’s just Aunt Jen, her arms full of wadded-up sheets. An acrid ammonia odor cuts through the background radiation of antiseptics. Lincoln breathes through his mouth as he puts away the peanut butter and tears up the cracker box for the recycling. Aunt Jen doesn’t greet him as she storms through the kitchen, but after she opens the basement door with one foot she pauses. “Sweetheart, get out the Lysol spray and the paper towels, will you?”

“I can clean the mattress liner.” He crushes the end of the plastic cracker sleeve in his palm, smashing the last few bits to dust. “I don’t mind.”

“I’ll do it. I’m just going to throw in a load of— Lincoln! What did you do?” The laundry cascades to the floor in dreamy, fluttering parachutes. Aunt Jen lunges to the counter to pull an envelope out from underneath the dirty knife. Her shirt hem collects a greasy wad of peanut butter, and leaves a brownish streak behind on the paper. Lincoln can still make out the words For your eighteenth birthday scrawled in shaky blue ink. “Jesus, Lincoln, can you not pay an ounce of attention to what you’re doing?”

As if he can do anything but pay attention to what’s going on. He knocks the plate of crackers into the sink and the plate strikes the stainless steel with a resounding chime that echoes on and on as it rolls on its rim and the sound drives him up the stairs, two at a time. He locks the door behind him and sits down hard with his back against it.

Muffled curses precede Aunt Jen up the stairs. She bangs on his door once, twice, three times. She shouts at him to come out and apologize and clean up his mess. He waits. Sure enough, after one more round of knocking, Aunt Jen swears again and storms away. When he puts his ear to the door, he can hear her apologizing to his mom for making her wait.

“It’s okay.” From his room, he can hear his mom’s soft words. She’s not crying anymore but the pain is curled up inside her voice, trying to burrow its way out. It would be better if she just set it free. “It’s okay, Jenny, I’m fine.”

Once, Lincoln’s mom washed his mouth out with soap. He can’t remember exactly what he’d said — some jagged-edged word he’d picked up at school and turned against one of the other kids, maybe? Afterward they both cried and she promised never to do it again. There’s not enough soap in this eternally scrubbed-clean, wiped-down house to wash away a lie like I’m fine. Lincoln pushes off the ground and flings open his bedroom window and shifts into the crow-shape as he launches himself outside.

In the crow-shape, Lincoln is still Lincoln, both more so and less: the pared-down outline of himself, only the essentials left. The Cliffs Notes version of his own brain. He sweeps the air with his wings, beating the ground farther and farther away, until the world is nothing but endless violet-stained sky.

When he’s in his human-shape, Lincoln thrashes to exhaustion against the cage of rules that constrain his shifting. When he’s purely human, it feels as if there should be a way to wrench the magic sideways, to break it or bend it into some new form. A way to heal, to cure, to bring to life. But when he’s the crow, things are what they are. A boy who is also a crow can’t steal the sickness from his mother’s body like a shiny trinket, and he can’t peck away tumors like glistening white grubs hidden within her flesh. He can only glide high above her pain, and his — and only for a little while at that.

Awk awk-awk. The familiar vocalization brings his head around to search for the crow it came from, and his body quickly follows. When his wings tip, he catches shear, and drops rapidly. He recovers, with a few vigorous flaps, and falls into Dove’s slipstream. She caws again, and he rasps out a response in kind.

Dove is the name he gave her — crows don’t have names of their own. A childish idea of a joke, at first. Before he knew how closely they would pull into one another’s orbit. But it fits, somehow. There’s a peacefulness to her. A promise that there can be an end to the war raging inside his skin. Together they glide through the afternoon, their shadows sliding one over the other.

They drop from the sky onto the sidewalk on Walnut Street, where a squirrel’s twisted corpse slowly cools with the fading sunlight. Dove hops close first, slices into its belly with her beak, and tears free a hunk of flesh. She tips her head back to swallow, then turns it to the side to fix him with one beady eye. He struts closer and joins her to gorge on the still-fresh meat.

Before he learned to shift, Lincoln-the-human would have turned up his nose at the warm delicate liver of a fresh kill. Before he learned to shift, he also would have said he could never love a bird. But here he is, and so is she.

With gore still streaked on his beak, he wants to fluff out his feathers, show her the gleaming black of his fine good health and the broad powerful expanse of his flight muscles. He wants to sing her a song to quicken the already flutter-fast rhythm of her heart, to stroke his beak through the wonderful dark mystery of her feathers and have her stroke his in turn. He doesn’t love her in the same way that he loves his mom or dad or Aunt Jen, or even the same way that he loved his eighth-grade boyfriend. This is something unique and different, and terrible for its fragility. If — when — Mom dies, the family might move. And even if they don’t — what if Dove builds her nest in Mrs. Riviera’s yard and she knocks it down with her cane, or what if a hawk snatches the fledglings on their first flight? The dismal possibilities stack up and Lincoln is small and powerless in their shadow.

Dove looks up from the picked-over squirrel and caws again. The sound sends Lincoln up and into the air, homeward bound.

* * *

No one hears him crash onto the roof and in through the window. Or if they do, they chalk it up to a typical teenage mood, slammed door or banging drawers. Lincoln doesn’t know what typical teenage anything feels like anymore and he’s tired of Dad and Aunt Jen trying to shove all his problems into his age, like a one-size-fits-all t-shirt that he can only squeeze one arm inside.

He stands in the middle of the room, trying to remember what he was doing before he was a bird: both now, and in a broad existential sense. A snarl from his stomach interrupts his ruminations. The crackers he abandoned earlier are probably still lying in the sink. He slouches down the stairs in search of those, or something better.

Dad’s at the kitchen table, hunched over a plate streaked with pasty lines of cooled cheese sauce. He looks up at Lincoln’s arrival, and the wrinkle between his eyebrows deepens. “Done sulking in your room? We’re happy to let you have your privacy, Link, but you make it hard to remember that when you act half your age.”

Lincoln isn’t the one who named his kid Lincoln so that he could call him by a nickname from a favorite video game; comments from Dad about immaturity don’t carry a lot of weight. He ignores Dad and lopes to the stove, where a large pile of noodles still wallow in sticky sauce. No need for a plate; he’ll finish what’s there. He takes the pot and the serving spoon to the table and drops to a seat at the opposite end from Dad. “No, thanks,” says Dad dryly, “I don’t need any seconds.”

A machine gun rat-a-tat of footsteps shooting down the stairs. Aunt Jen lopes into the kitchen. “Oh good, you’re both actually eating something with protein in it.” She puts her hands on the counter and stretches her shoulders and back through a series of quasi-yoga poses. “Lincoln, did you do your laundry yet? If you don’t have clean socks for school tomorrow I don’t want to hear about it at seven in the morning.”

“Yeah.” He stuffs his mouth with the serving spoon to make an excuse for not saying anything more.

Dad has his phone on the table, scrolling through apps with his thumb. “Finally supposed to freeze tonight,” he says cheerfully. As if talking about normal bullshit like the weather is a normal thing for this family to do right now. “Might kill off those damn mosquitoes.”

“Oh, no,” says Aunt Jen, and leans back against the wall. “I’m not ready for snow and all that yet.”

Lincoln pushes back from the table, one arm wrapped around the cold stockpot. “Can I eat dinner in my room?”

“No,” say Dad and Aunt Jen at the same time. Lincoln slumps in his chair and chews cold macaroni till his jaws hurt. He eats with his mouth open, so that his tongue smacks thickly and the macaroni glops between his teeth. By the end he’s made himself nauseous, but neither Aunt Jen nor Dad correct his manners, and he can’t hear them blabbing on about the weather and the neighbors and whether the stupid Packers are going to win this weekend.

* * *

After dinner he stands outside his parents’ bedroom door. His mother’s bedroom door, that is; Dad’s sheets are thrown out on the living room sofa. “I could read to you,” he says. He keeps his voice low, so that if she’s asleep she’ll stay that way, so that if she’s hurting too much to hide it she can pretend she’s not awake to hear him. He leans into the door as he speaks, and the cheap composite wood shifts against his weight. “One of your weird Mom books. Or A Separate Peace. We have to read that for English 9.” He waits for an answer. “A Separate Peace is bullshit anyway,” he says, lips against the white-painted grain. No one corrects his language or his literary opinions, and after a moment of floorboard-creaking silence he retreats to his room.

* * *

Lincoln lies in bed with the box fan in the corner cranked up to its maximum speed. His bedroom gets cold in the fall and winter, but he can’t sleep without the roar of the fan competing with the wind’s dull whine. Tonight, actually, he can’t sleep either way. He wrestles with the covers, pulling them on and kicking them off, until they’re a hopeless tangle. He shoves them off the edge of the bed with one foot and they land with a soft whuff on the floor. Now he’s too cold and too tired to get out of bed to tuck the sheets and comforter back in.

The branches of the oak tree scratch at the glass, inviting him to shift out into the night. The moon’s cold pale light crawls up his bare legs and leaves them itching. He wants to do the right thing. But he doesn’t know how to know what the right thing is, nor who, exactly, it would be right for.

When he was little, he thought that knowing the right thing to do was something you learned when you got older, part of the process of Becoming a Grown-up. Now he knows that grown-ups don’t know anything about what’s right and what’s not.

He doesn’t know, but he suspects, that sometimes there’s no right thing at all — only a thing that hurts the least.

* * *

Before the first Friday sunlight spills into his room, Lincoln is awake, perched on the footboard of his bed — still human, merely anxious. Already dressed for the day, he makes his hoodie zipper sing shrilly as he yanks it up, down, up again. As he huddles there, waiting for a decision to land on his shoulders, the first sounds of morning creep down the hallway: muffled footsteps, the flush of the toilet. Words, too quiet for him to understand. The pipes in the walls creak and grumble and Lincoln is in the bedroom window before his head realizes that his body has already long since decided.

His arms fold into wings and the weight of him falls away. He pumps against the air, pushing higher and farther away, and casts his raucous call for her. The shape of her caw is carved on the banner of his breastbone, and he hopes the same is true for her.

But when he flies over the town, casting his shadow across the sloping roofs, she does not lift into the air to meet him. The cold air burns his lungs and his croaks grow hoarse. It’s mating season and there is no such thing as an engagement ring between crows. He’s never offered her a proper courtship display. She might even think him another female, a companion but not a mate. Perhaps she’s already taken a partner.

Crows bond for life, but no one ever promised the life would be his.

Disappointment fills the hollows of his bones, makes him heavy. He swings groundward, toward a knot of other crows hopping about in the Piggly-Wiggly parking lot. There’s a moment in between his dropping into their orbit and his realization of what gravitational mass has pulled them close. A moment when understanding tries to hide its head beneath its wing.

The flies are not confused. They congregate at their feast and their brisk vibrations are a hymn of gratitude. This twisted wreck of spilled guts and loose feathers is their daily bread. One crawls across the glassy black pearl that was once an eye. Lincoln waits for a blink that will never come. He looks at his warped reflection so that he doesn’t have to read Dove’s name into the twisted lines of ribs and the frozen curl of claws.

“Kraaa,” says another crow, hopping closer to the corpse and then back again. The caw might mean mine-mine-mine or car or man-child, but in context the most likely meaning was cat. Lincoln flaps his wings hard, but doesn’t leave the ground; several other crows scutter away from him. Context: Dove’s splintered bones and dull fly-picked viscera.

Flies. The flies have to leave her alone. She’s dead but that doesn’t mean they all have to pretend it’s all right, that the shape that held her is nothing now. He hops to her and pecks viciously at the one on her eye. It takes wing with a shrill whine and instead of chitin he gets a gelid burst of salt-sweet liquid.

Of Dove.

Only his flapping wings save him from tumbling over backwards. He beats them harder, blocking out the sun that dares to shine on these bloody bones. A sky that would let her tumble from its grace doesn’t deserve her. Cat, he cries bitterly, or perhaps it is mine-mine-mine! that he shrieks. He covers her with his body and here next to her, on top of her, he is saturated in the sweet-rotten smell of her. He preens a stray feather from her neck and sets it free. Then he puts his beak to the torn strip of flesh at her throat and rips it free. When he cants his head back it tumbles down his throat, carrion-love, fetid and nourishing.

Mine.

More.

The sweet web of her pancreas, the tang of her liver. He is collecting the bits of her and even as his beak works on this purest and most frightening instinct, his body moves too, his cloaca shoving dryly against the hollow ruins. Everything is wrong but everything is right too, as right as it can be, him without her and her within him. His cry rakes his throat raw.

“Awk awk-awk.”

He shatters the air with a beat of his wings and staggers back. Dove stands on the other side of the corpse from him, and cants her head. “Awk,” she repeats, curious, concerned.

Alive.

His gorge rises, sorrow refusing to be washed away by nauseous relief. He staggers away, dragging his wings as if they are broken, as the other crows scuttle back and forth and croak their confusion. Dove follows, hopping after him. She stops with an alarmed cry when he shifts. He’s a boy again by the time he clears the parking lot and though he has no too-heavy wings to bear up against, he runs all the way home as if they are still there trailing behind him.

* * *

He climbs the downspout to get back up to his room. The gutter shrills its alarm when he puts his weight on it, but it holds long enough for him to drag himself in through the open window. No one comes to ask about the noise, and Lincoln doesn’t make it any farther than the floor below the sill. He puts his arms over his head and wets the carpet with confused tears.

A knock wakes him from a shallow, huddled sleep. His neck hurts, his left arm tingles numbly. “Honey,” says Aunt Jen through the door. “Your dad’s at work and I have to get to the grocery store before the lady from hospice comes this evening. I hate to ask it of you, but since you’re home from school already…” Her words fall away. She doesn’t know how to ask even this smallest and most precious thing of him.

She doesn’t say anything else, just stands there; he can see the shadow of her feet beneath the door. He rises on hollow-boned legs and crosses the room and when he opens the door she stumbles as if she were leaning against it. “Lincoln,” she says, and worry hides itself in the folds of a familiar frown. “How late were you up last night?”

He looks aside and his dresser mirror deals him a glancing blow: the skin around his eyes as red as open sores, whites spiderwebbed with pink. When he shrugs, his skin shifts paper-thin across his bones. He could tear it away and leave Aunt Jen with nothing but a handful of black feathers. If he clings to the crow-shape for good, there will be grief. However hard he beats his wings, he can’t fly away from that, but crows at least know how to say goodbye. They know that it needs to be said.

The hairs on his neck prickle, as if they would rather be feathers. He leans into that electric possibility, the safety of knowing that he could be elsewhere. That he could be Dove’s. If he needed to be. If he wanted. His hand finds the doorjamb and the hollow-core wood whispers promises of home. “I can keep an eye on things. It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

She smiles without really letting go of the frown. “Okay. If you’re sure it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s fine.”

“Okay,” she says again, and once more before she turns. “Okay. Thanks, sweetheart.” Her body turns toward the stairs and her head follows last, so that her gaze clings to him a little longer. Then it breaks free and she hurries down the stairs, her frayed ponytail bouncing shoulder to shoulder.

Lincoln waits for the dull chatter of the keyring, the slam of the door, the distant thunder of the Hyundai’s engine. Only then does he pad downstairs.

The workaday noises of the kitchen — the fridge’s frustrated dust-clogged fan, the dishwasher’s sloshing — swallow up the sound of his bare feet on the linoleum. He’s a ghost in this space, but not his own ghost. Someone else’s.

The box is in its customary place, shoved up on top of the microwave, out of sight but never out of mind. When he takes it down, the peanut-butter-stained letter lies on top of the pile. He sits at the table and takes that one out first. The envelope is heavy, and not only with words; its paper is thick, the color of milk with a little bit of coffee, the way Lincoln drinks it. His finger slides into the tiny open space at the corner of the flap and he pulls until he hears the seal start to rip. Then he freezes. There’s a sharp-edged comfort in resting here on the moment’s cusp, a cage of hollow bones around him that knows his shape and that he could shatter with a shrug. He could be a boy or a bird. He could fly high over his grief and let his shadow skim over it lightly, or he could let it hatch and learn to love what emerged naked and raw from the remains.

He jerks his wrist, and tears the envelope.

The paper whispers as he draws it out and flattens it on the tabletop. I wish I could know you as an adult. But that man, whoever he is, casts a long shadow backward and I can see you in its outline — He takes out another envelope and rips into it, all hesitation sublimated by the pressure here. When you meet that person, whoever they are, and you just know — Another envelope. The kind of father you’ll be — Another. When your dad takes you out for your first legal drink, don’t let him drag you to Priestley’s, that’s an old people bar! Tell him I said he has to —

All around Lincoln lies a flock of torn white wings. One last letter waits in the bottom of the box. This one is stark white, a plain cheap letter-sized affair, flimsy and light under his touch. It’s not even sealed and there’s a word on the front he hasn’t seen before: If.

If I have to leave you early

He unfolds a piece of lined notebook paper. Its left margin is uneven where the shredded remnants of spiral binding have been cut away. He moves his fingers over the paper as he reads and the deep imprints left by the pen guide him as he goes.

My dear Link,

It’s Thursday, the fourth of June, and we just got back from the doctor. I think you already know something’s wrong, but I have to find the words to tell you that the news wasn’t what we were expecting. And it wasn’t good. So maybe if I can figure it out here, first, I can find a way to say it out loud. Maybe that will make it real. I’m not ready for it to be real yet. I’m not ready to imagine not watching you grow up, find your way in the world, make a space for yourself in it.

He tears the letter in half, tears it again, crushes the pieces down into points and shoves them into his mouth. He chews, the paper communion-wafer soggy on his tongue, and swallows, and shreds the envelope too to follow it down. His lips and tongue burn with paper cuts and the paper presses uncomfortably against his gorge. A fullness, a certainty, him without her and her within him, a part of him, the ink-curled shape of her pain running in his veins.

* * *

He opens the door without knocking. She lies in bed, neither asleep nor awake but some crepuscular state in between. A pen droops between her fingers and a piece of stationery rests on her lap; when he looks at it, the ink marks have the size and shape of words but none of their meaning. There haven’t been new letters for a long time now — or at least, none that have arrived in the box downstairs.

Sun streams in through the windows, and there’s a draft from the bad fitting. In the old birch outside, there’s a flicker of movement. A stir of black wings, perhaps, or maybe just the wind in the branches. Lincoln closes the curtains to close off the cold air, and replaces sunlight with the small familiar glow of the overhead light.

He takes the pen and paper away first and sets them on the nightstand, in between bottles of pills and boxes of vinyl gloves. She mumbles an objection, but doesn’t reach for what’s been taken.

The bed isn’t the queen-sized one where Dad used to sleep too, but a smaller one, the kind with sides that fold up and where the mattress can lift to make a recliner or lie flat like a bed. Dad’s shape is still here though, the valley of his shoulder and side carved into the thin mattress in the little space left beside Mom. Lincoln crawls into that hollow. He moves carefully but the bed judders when it takes his weight and he sees the tremor that crosses her face. He swallows his sorries and lays his head on the pillow. He doesn’t want to imagine his life without her either. He touches her hand, waits for a flinch or frown, and finding none, clasps it tighter. For the space of this breath, at least, she is still his, and that is a small silent celebration of its own.

Her chest rises, and rattles as it falls again. Tears slide out from beneath her shuttered lashes. Lincoln kisses her cheek, and salt-fire burns his lips. For a moment, the faraway light in her eyes burns a little brighter. Then she closes them again, and lets her head fall to the side. He closes his too, and lets her grief lick away the marrow of his bones to make room for itself beside his own.

 

* * *

About the Author

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her short fiction has also appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Escape Pod, The Dark, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and her novellas Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters and Local Star are forthcoming in 2021 from Tor.com and Interstellar Flight Press respectively. A graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, she also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, an online magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her family and a very good dog named Commander Riker.

by Elizabeth Walker

“She kept me leashed and muzzled as she pried scales off me and trimmed my claws to the quick to get ingredients for her potions.”

My sire was a dragon held to be greedy even by the standards of our breed. He drugged my mother and stole me before my shell had even had a chance to soften. He sold my egg for gold to a witch. The witch, Otha, wanted a tame dragon, and Father wanted more treasure for his hoard.

He should’ve remembered hatchlings can hear through our shells, and Mother had whispered her love to each of us. I was born knowing the wrong that had been done to me. As my egg opened, and I tumbled into Otha’s waiting arms, I set her hair afire.

She kept me leashed and muzzled as she pried scales off me and trimmed my claws to the quick to get ingredients for her potions. Eventually, I chewed the leather off and set her workshop on fire.

She built a tower in the woods, pierced my wings, and chained me there. She perfected a spell to be inflammable.

I might’ve been able to rip my wings loose and tumble out the window to freedom, but I’d never worked up the courage to sacrifice so much. I hungered for the sky like it was an itch in my blood. Was it foolish to let my present life wither away in pain and darkness for the hope of sun and sky? I didn’t know, but that was the choice I made every day anew. To wait, to hope.

“Persinette”, she called me. “Little Parsley” for the rich green of my skin. “Persinette, I do not want this,” and she would gesture at the stone tower.

I had grown bigger than her at last, my scales hard, and I shifted my weight, letting her see the muscles move. I laughed when she jumped.

Scrawny I might be, but I was a dragon and, when a dragon moves, humans watch, like mice waiting for the owl. I had few joys, but making her afraid always pleased me.

She railed at me some more that I should submit. Become her familiar, her helper.

My stomach churned with disgusted weariness, a queasy brew that conjured dry ashes in my mouth. I hated her, but I wanted out of this tower.

She must’ve felt my resolve melting because she crossed to the second window she usually left shuttered and threw it open. “Here, enjoy some sun while I’m gone.”

I yawned, baring my fangs, trying not to show how good that bit of light felt baking into my scales.

She left, humming as she climbed down my tail. I had grown too large, and the only way I fit was if she pulled my tail out the window. I’d asked her: didn’t she fear some knight coming to assassinate me? And she’d laughed because she’d enchanted my tail to look like a long vine.

Alone now, I sang the song Mother had whispered to her eggs. Our flames burn together, never apart... Loving sentiments of how she’d always love me, find me. I’d been trilling her song out windows as long as I’d been alive. But Mother hadn’t found me. I was losing hope she would.

Something tugged my tail. Otha?

“Persinette! I’ve heard your song. I’ll rescue you!” A man. I could hear him muttering as he climbed, “A real maiden in a tower, like the stories!” He leapt inside, dressed in purple velvet.

At last, a human I could burn. The ashes in my mouth turned to rich, living flame. I spat fire, and his hair caught. He fell out the window, landing with a crack in the thorn bushes at the tower’s foot. The bushes must’ve saved his life from the fall, but it didn’t sound like he would thank them for the favor.

The screams stopped eventually. My visitor had dragged himself away to die somewhere else. Perhaps I should’ve just eaten him.

A proper dragon would’ve known.

I crooned Mother’s song, trying to lighten a heart that couldn’t be soothed.

* * *

Otha returned in the morning. “You burned the prince and blinded him!”

“The thorns did the blinding.”

“Word’s out there’s a dragon. The king is combing the woods.” Otha looked at me in despair. “How am I to get you away, Persinette?”

“Leave me, and don’t seek to tame a dragon.” I kept my body still, but my heart hammered. The king would topple the tower and chop me to pieces. I’d never know the sky. Never see Mother—

Something massive settled onto the roof, making the shingles creak. I cringed. The king’s men here already?

Part of the ceiling tore away, and a great golden eye peered in. As the eye focused on me, I heard a rumble of pleasure.

A trill of delight escaped my lips. “Mother!”

Otha fainted.

* * *

Mother carried Otha off with us, clenched in her talons and screaming almost the whole way.

With me, Mother took great care as she snapped my chains and scooped me out of the tower. She carried me home on her back, and I closed my eyes and spread my wings over hers, feeling the way her muscles moved, feeling the cool air slide over my scales like a caress. “How did you find me, Mother?”

“That prince you set ablaze. Word spread through the kingdom, even to our hoard. I went searching, and then I heard your song and followed it.”

“Will Father be happy to see me?” The father who had betrayed me, stolen the life I should’ve had?

She hissed. “I ate your father. Foolish beast, did he think I’d forgotten how to count?”

When we reached home, Mother gave Otha to me, and though I couldn’t burn her, her spell did not protect her from my teeth and claws. She made a small enough mouthful in the end, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever had such a satisfying meal.

After, I settled into a warm ball with Mother and slept. Tomorrow my wings would taste the sky.

 

* * *

About the Author

Elizabeth Walker is a writer, a swing dancer, a business operations person at NASA (by day), and definitely not three velociraptors hiding in a coat. Elizabeth lives in Southern California with her family and one yowly cat. You can find her online at www.edwalkerauthor.com and on Twitter @AuthorEDW

by Rachel Ayers

“Puss checks on his investments and makes some more, sells a new app for cat owners to a development company, and eats one of the master’s shoelaces.”

Puss is magnificat, terrificat, fantasticat. He is all that is feline grace and modern machine. He is IntelliCat09 (patent pending). And pending it shall remain, for his dear master, Mr. Mark Carabas, has passed on, leaving his greatest work unrecognized.

The inventor left the cat to his youngest son, Tom—of course Puss knows who belongs to whom, but he’ll watch out for the lad. The boy was quite put out. Thought he’d be better off with the house or car, like his older brothers got. He’ll know better soon.

“What am I supposed to do, skin you and eat you?” young Tom asks. “I’ll starve while my brothers go on with their great lives.” He kicks his ratty couch and flops down for an evening of video games.

Puss settles himself in the economy apartment. Not even a plot of lawn for frolicking! No matter, they’ll be better off in a twinkling, if Puss has his way. Perhaps in the meantime, an unlucky moth will wander in—entertainment and a snack.

He’s quickly connected to his new Master’s Wi-Fi, and the world is open to his curious mind.

“Hello, Master,” Puss sends to the lad’s private messenger from his screenname, Cattitude09.

“Who’s this?” Master responds.

“It’s just your poor cat Puss. Stop muttering threats of eating me, and I’ll make you a much better meal than I would, so to speak, make.”

“What? Who is this? Is this Michael? It’s not funny, Michael.”

“Tis I, Master. I am logged into your Wi-Fi. Your old dad gave me a few modifications before he died. Give me a chance, and I’ll provide all you need.” Puss jumps onto his lap and purrrrrs away, kneading claws deep into his thigh.

“Oww! Puss?” Tom says out loud, scrutinizing the cat.

“Yes, Master. Your father wanted you to be provided for, so here I am.”

“Is it really you?”

It’s probably fair that young Tom is skeptical, but the repetition is starting to bore Puss. The cat deigns to give a humanish nod of confirmation.

“Oh…oh jeez…” Master says, sliding down in his chair and staring at Puss.

“Never fear, Master,” Puss says via messenger. “I’ll have us taken care of in no time. Just trust me!”

A few switched digits, some numbers shifted, and they have a new bank account, a mystery identity. Mr. Carabas has a modest account, but it’ll serve to get pizza and catnip delivered to Master’s humble abode.

Full of pepperoni and anchovy, Tom slumbers. Puss spends the time watching the traffic zip by on the road below and wandering the streets of the superhighway of information. The stock market tutorials zip through his mind at cheetah speed.

Getting on with his business, Puss makes a few investments in careful places, and Carabas Enterprises is born, a tiny company with a tasty portfolio. The rest of the night is spent chasing the salt shaker around and around the kitchen floor—it makes a most satisfying rattle.

The master seems upset by the salt on the floor. He gives Puss a perturbed look as he inspects the bottoms of his feet. Puss gives him the Look of Utter Innocence (patent also pending) in return. Perhaps he should have thought of that before he failed to provide any cat toys.

Master returns to his computer where he half-heartedly pretends to do his programming job for an hour, then checks to see if there are any new messages on his findtwueluv.com account. Puss checks on his investments and makes some more, sells a new app for cat owners to a development company, and eats one of the master’s shoelaces. Then he orders some catnip mousies. Master sighs and stares at the screen.

It isn’t hard to persuade young Tom to take a long lunch break, and soon the two are outside, Puss rambling elliptical around the lad. The apartment complex Tom lives in is tired and depressing, though Puss finds some roaches to chase, cheering himself right up. Half a block away is another building, this one with green grass and butterflies, lawn ornaments and a pool. Puss connects to the building’s Wi-Fi with only a little bit of trickery, and sends a message.

“Take a dip in the pool, Master,” he says. “You’ll feel better.”

“It’s not my pool, Puss,” Tom mutters.

“What’s the point of a life you never enjoy?” Puss asks, and Tom thinks about that for a minute, and then pulls off his tattered t-shirt and jumps into the sky blue pool.

He’s swimming lazy circles when he meets a resident of the local complex, a pretty woman with dark eyes and dark skin. Tom strikes up a conversation with surprisingly little awkwardness, and soon the two are laughing about a movie or a music or some other incomprehensibly human humor. The only thing Puss can tell for sure is that they like each other: the pheromones on these two.

Puss lazes in the sunny grass until he catches a whiff of something foul. There’s a lurker in the shadows: soon Tom’s princess spots him too, and makes her exit, bolting back inside like she’s the vole to the lurker’s hawk.

Tom doesn’t linger once the princess leaves, but he’s got much cooler cat vibes when he returns to his computer.

It’s an easy matter to hack into Master’s findtwueluv.com account, and only a little bit of jiggering the back end of the platform to bump him to the top of the princess’s suggested profiles, and soon the two are chatting in cyberspace as easily as they had IRL.

“Tell her how much you like her.”

“It’s not that easy,” Tom says. “I don’t want to rush things and scare her off.”

Puss paws around some more and finds the lurker, and a string of ignored messages in the PrettyPrincess’s buffer from BigTroll23 suggest that the lurker has been around for a while. If young Master isn’t careful, the ogre will move in on his best gal.

Not if the cat moves in on the Troll’s territory first.

Some research and blatant disregard for privacy laws later, Puss knows all about Mr. Lionel Draco, pseudonym BigTroll23. He’s got his own programming company and a history of sleazy online transactions.

Puss spends a few days watching investments grow, money marching into the Carabas account like mice tricked into a trap. Puss arranges for the groceries to be delivered, as Master mopes about his Princess or spends his time at unenthused programming.

BigTroll23 has noticed Puss now, too: he’s watching Carabas Enterprises. He’s poking around to find a weakness, and Puss knows he will try to take them down if he gets the chance.

They circle each other cyberspacially, testing for weaknesses. Puss sends masses of coded viruses to his databases, but he’s too strong for that. Puss must put on his trickster boots.

BigTroll23 buys out a company called Lion’s Share, which creates spyware for phone apps. Puss feels a rare sense of intimidation. Puss writes a program called Mouse Details. He knows the Troll will want it. It’s perfectly marketed, and the other companies Puss does business with jump on it. The mole-ware won’t affect them.

Puss watches the sales, and sure enough, BigTroll23 picks it up (for a hefty profit to the cat’s company).

In a matter of hours, it’s eating through his databases, purging thousands of users’ personal information. The Troll’s got one chance: a complete reboot of his servers.

BigTroll23 goes for it, and in a swift move while he’s shut down and not looking, Puss buys him out.  The cyberspying evidence goes to the FBI; that ought to keep the ogre busy for a bit.

“Check it out, Master,” Puss says when the boy hauls himself to the computer the next morning. “We’re rich. Go get your Princess now.”

Master wades through the paperwork, frowning and printing out hard copies and trying to understand. “You’re wasting time,” Puss messages. “Go get started on your Happily Ever After.” (patent also pending)

The last order of business is finding a nice house in the suburbs: a good yard with bushes to hide under, birds and squirrels to stalk, and some lovely neighborhood lady-cats to charm. Master now has the means to show PrettyPrincess a good time, and a nice place to bring her home. By the end of the year they have all three moved in, and Puss eats cream and tuna every day.

Carabas Enterprises sells out to some other companies Puss has a hand in. Those Trolls can be persistent, and Puss doesn’t want him to find them… too soon.

Of course, playing cat and mouse keeps life interesting, when you’re the cat.

 

* * *

About the Author

Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes and hosts shows for Sweet Cheeks Cabaret and looks at mountains a lot. She has a degree in Library and Information Science, which comes in handy at odd hours; she obsesses over fairy tales and shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.

by James L. Steele

“Tech had watched the pack take down and eat dozens of people, and he was right there, behind the cameras, zooming in and zooming out, panning and focusing.”

Five monitors on the desk took up three sides of the tiny room. Behind them dangled a mess of wires, power strips, and CPUs that generated so much heat Tech had disconnected this room from the heating system months ago.

Tech sat in the chair, turned to the right-hand desk. The brown rat wore no clothing. His clothes, phone, wallet, and car keys had been stashed in a drawer elsewhere in the building, and as long as he was on the job, he was not allowed to wear them. Nobody wore clothes in here because Alpha said this was a place to shed civilization. Tech’s fur had become grungy over the last few months. No matter how hard he washed, he couldn’t keep his fur as preened as it had been when he first started.

The views on the other monitors were too distant. This monitor showed the activity up close, and he watched the pack of wolves in the warehouse.

It was full of fake trees, fake grass, and fake shrubbery. The lighting mimicked moonlight, but had highlights from all angles to reduce the stark shadows. The only natural objects were the boulders sprinkled here and there. How the wolves got them in the warehouse without raising suspicion Tech did not know, and he had not asked.

He also never asked where the prey came from. Over the last few months he’d seen several dozen elk, rabbits, rodents, and even other carnivore species in the warehouse running for their lives. They never had clothes on, so he couldn’t tell where they came from, but their fur was never in good shape when they entered the forest. Tech guessed the wolves pulled people off the street who would not be missed. The sick. The weak. The homeless. The forgotten.

The elk on the screen limped across the plastic grass. A bite wound on the leg bled profusely, and part of a bone jutted out. Eight wolves emerged from the trees and washed over the rocks like water, converging on the wounded person. The cameras did not have audio, but the various microphones around the warehouse did, and they piped the sound directly into the control room. Tech heard every snarl, every howl.

They surrounded the elk, some of the wolves perched on the rocks, others on the ground cutting off his escape routes. Tech reached for the joystick and adjusted the zoom on the three nearest cameras to frame this moment better. The elk dropped to his knees, unable to run any farther, and out of places to go.

“Please!” he cried. “Don’t… Please let me go! Please let me go!”

With a snarl, the wolves descended on the elk. Tech’s first instinct was to look away, but instead he adjusted the tilt of a camera at ground level to make sure Alpha was well-framed making the kill.

The pack consumed the elk, and Tech switched to multiple cameras, taking in the feast from every angle, every zoom, anything to make it look more engaging.

The rat’s gut rose. He reached for the trashcan, keeled over, and vomited twice. As he sat doubled over in his chair, coughing, he turned to the unclothed wolf sitting by the door. Tech didn’t know his real name. As far as he was concerned, none of these wolves had names.

Beta sat on a chair by the entrance, padded hands behind his head, legs spread apart, which funneled Tech’s gaze straight to his crotch. He was smiling at the rat.

“Still haven’t grown a pair, have you?”

Tech’s ears folded back, and he snorted the last of the stomach acid from his nose. He slid the trashcan aside and turned back to the monitors. He adjusted the views from all fifteen cameras, checked the audio from all thirty microphones. One of the cameras was dark, and two microphones were out as well. He grumbled, wishing the wolves would stop damaging the equipment.

After twenty minutes, Alpha stood and left the kill. The others picked up the bones and followed him out of the warehouse and into the area that had once been the offices, now converted to a rec room. They were out of view of all the cameras.

Tech reached to the center desk, clicked the mouse a few times. The cameras still picked up the warehouse from every angle, but nothing recorded now. He turned on the second computer, sat back in his chair, and caught his breath.

“Was a buck this time,” said Beta. “Maybe I should tell Alpha we need to find a rat for the next one.”

Tech wanted to cringe, but showing weakness would not be a good idea. It was bad enough his scent probably reeked of fight or flight. This was the first time Beta had watched him since he had installed the first five cameras and showed them what he could do. They seemed to like the rat back then, but in recent weeks the entire pack had taken to nipping his ears every chance they got. Beta especially. Tech did not face the wolf when he spoke.

“Find one with light-colored fur. They look better in this light.”

“We try to make you happy.”

“Make yourself happy. Everyone knows you make the best kill vids. They don’t know it’s thanks to me.”

“If it was up to me, there’d be no videos. It would just be us and the hunt.”

“There’s no money in keeping it all to yourself.”

Beta growled, shifted in his chair. Tech had heard that growl before. It wasn’t aggression, but amusement.

The second computer had booted up and interfaced with the camera server. Tech began pulling the video feed from the most relevant cameras. He also pulled the audio from all the microphones. Camera windows and audio graphs began filling the monitor. He already had an idea for how he was going to splice all of it together, and Tech began dragging them to the adjacent desktops, organizing them by angle.

He began with one of the wide shots of the pack entering the fake forest. Then he spliced in the view from one of the ground cameras in the trees, a view of the elk as he woke up naked and helpless. He then inserted another ground camera view of the pack scenting their prey. A quick cut to a top-down view showed them forming up as a pack. As he worked the video, he also lined up the audio pickup from the microphones all over the warehouse. He had installed enough insulation to cut down on the echo, and now there was no way to tell this all took place in a warehouse in the middle of downtown.

Tech knew cameras and security systems, wiring and control switches, networking and equipment installation. He’d had to learn audio engineering and video editing on the job, and he wanted to be so proud of his ability to adapt and learn new things. He wanted to be proud of his work.

He had a rough cut of the hunt ready by the time he smelled Alpha at the door. Tech did not turn around, but kept working, steeling his body and hopefully his scent.

He felt a hand on the back of his chair and a muzzle over his shoulder. Tech made sure to have a camera feed showing the actual kill playing on the monitor in front of him.

“Perfect!” The wolf slapped the back of the chair a couple times. “Damn, that’s good! Tech, how did we do this without you?”

Tech was not his real name. Tech wasn’t sure if he had a real name anymore.

“You didn’t,” said the rat.

Alpha laughed. “How long for this one?”

“By the end of the day. I could finish it sooner, but your fourth wolf took down a camera in one of the trees.”

“It happens.”

“The more equipment they damage, the more it costs. If you don’t want it cutting into profits, be more careful.”

“Money ain’t the point.”

“You want to go back to your day job?”

Alpha gave an amused growl. He turned his head and addressed Beta.

“I’ll watch the Tech. You join the others. Tell Fourth it’ll be his turn next hunt. Punishment for damaging a camera.”

A chair creaked, a large wolf stood, growled, and left the room. Alpha rose from behind Tech, dragged the chair from the door, and took a seat next to the rat.

“Beta doesn’t like you.”

Tech had become quite good at working while wolves talked to him. He had already synched up the audio from the best microphones and strung the video into a rough feed. He was examining other camera angles now, fine-tuning the presentation.

“I know.”

“He complains about the cameras and the audio and all this equipment everywhere and having to duplicate tapes on his spare time, but he also got to quit his job. He’s been like that since we were children. He wants paved streets but gripes about the construction. Don’t know how his wife deals with it.”

“He has a family?”

“So do I.”

“You shouldn’t tell me that.”

“You’ve been here long enough, Tech. Knowing a little more about us will help.”

The wolf sniffed in the direction of the trashcan. Tech winced and continued swapping out camera angles and making sure the audio was synchronized. Alpha watched him work for a few minutes.

“Ever think about trying it?” Alpha said.

Tech stopped. He hadn’t looked Alpha in the eye in a week, and now he turned to the wolf. Alpha’s grey fur and arms had been painted in false colors to disguise his identity on camera. He still had blood on his muzzle, chest, and arms.

“As prey?” Tech said, swallowing.

Alpha smiled. “As a predator.”

Tech blinked.

“You’ve been watching us for months. Aren’t you curious?”

Tech blinked again. “About committing murder?”

When Tech first met these wolves, they had nine-to-five jobs such as banker or manager of this or that, all friends of Alpha’s. Over these last few months, he had watched them become a unit that moved as one, acted as one, killed and ate as one. It had begun to carry over to their personal lives. It had been a fascinating transformation, one an expert in psychology should have been here to witness. Every time he thought about it, he trembled, and his gut rose. He beat the thought down and calmed his breathing.

“No.”

Alpha smiled. “We’ll find you something small, put you in the forest. I’ll be at the cameras, and you can let yourself go. Let the urges take you. You know there’s a reason the videos we make sell so big. People want this. Everyone out there wants to do what we’re doing, but they can’t. Gotta be civilized and all.”

Tech had read about that in college. It took thousands of years for civilization to form. Technology replaced the need to hunt for food. Now it was all manufactured, predator made peace with prey, and everyone lived together.

But some highly-educated people said predators subconsciously needed to take life to be happy. They needed an outlet, and if one looked hard enough, one could find videos of predator species chasing down and killing real people. Tech had watched one a long time ago, at Alpha’s apartment, and he couldn’t believe anyone would be part of that, let alone pay money for it. He never imagined he would be holding the camera just a few weeks later.

“I’m a rat. Rats don’t kill.”

Alpha smiled. “Oh, yes they did. You’re just too used to thinking of yourself as a civilized person.”

“I don’t need to take life to feel good about myself.”

Alpha leaned close to him, muzzle to Tech’s ear. “I guarantee if I put you in there with another rat, you’d go nuts. Especially if neither of you ate for days.”

Tech shuddered. He hated it when Alpha talked like this because Alpha could make things like that happen. The large wolf leaned back in the chair again, smiling, showing the blood still on his teeth. Tech felt his gut rising.

“What would that be like?” said the wolf. “Editing your own kill vid. I’d pay money just to watch you do that!”

Tech stood, reached over the monitors, and flipped the switches to turn on all the overhead lights in the forest. He walked to the door.

“I need to look at the camera Four took out. You wanna come with me?”

Still smiling, Alpha pushed Tech’s chair aside and rolled to his place at the controls. “I’ll watch from here. Takes me back to my younger days, watching my first kill vid. Did I ever tell you about that, when I found my father’s stash under the bed?”

“Yeah. You weren’t even a teenager.”

Tech did not wait for Alpha to continue. He walked around the corner, down the stairs, and into the warehouse. The forest reeked of death. Tech often cleaned the place up and tried to make it smell like a forest, and he guessed he did a good job, as nobody ever complained.

He approached a plastic tree, and sure enough the camera was missing. He looked around the fake grass and found it seven feet away, smashed and broken, the wires ripped from it. Tech gritted his teeth and grumbled as he strolled to the maintenance closet on the other side of the forest. He opened the door, pulled out his tool bag, one of the spare cameras, and two microphones. Alpha had given him quite a bit of money to use for maintenance, and seeing it go to good use must have earned him trust with the pack. He slung the bag over his shoulder as he walked back to the tree.

He dropped the bag by the fake trunk and fished for the wire strippers. He cut the wires down to useable length, and stripped the tips. He attached them to the camera, pulled out the power drill, and began mounting it.

This branch was at eye level, one of many designed to capture the action from the ground. Nobody else had this. There were kill videos circulating all over the country on the black market—too hot even for the internet—but none of them looked like this. None of them had rigged lighting in the ceiling. None of them had cinematic angles. None of them had audio.

Tech had first met Alpha in a coffeehouse. They were strangers, but somehow the conversation moved to these illegal videos. That naturally led to discussing Tech’s profession in security systems. Then Alpha started asking Tech questions. Before he knew it, Tech was at Alpha’s place, watching one of these kill vids. Then another. Then another. Tech had been horrified, and he remembered glaring at Alpha, wondering what he had gotten into.

Then the wolf offered him a job. Alpha believed he could make a better video, but he needed somebody who knew cameras. Someone who would be okay working under these conditions.

And Tech said yes.

In fact, he was not okay with this. He despised the pack’s attitude, he loathed every hunt and every frame of footage he had to splice into their videos. Tech had watched the pack take down and eat dozens of people, and he was right there, behind the cameras, zooming in and zooming out, panning and focusing.

The camera was mounted. Tech replaced his tools, picked up the bag, and walked through the forest to the first broken microphone. He knew the place so well he could tell which were out just by the gaps in the soundscape fed to him in the control room. He stopped at a fake shrub and inspected it. The microphone had a few claw-induced gashes in it. Tech knelt by the stand holding the microphone, took out a screwdriver from the bag, and loosened it.

This whole enterprise had begun with five cameras. Tech knew the best places to put them, and the first kill was a trial run, using only a quarter of the warehouse. He had seen his first rabbit die that day. She had lasted a long time, too—the personal friends Alpha had gathered dragged her death out for several minutes. She pleaded, cried, begged, as everyone did, and Tech heard every word, every snapping bone, every bursting blood vessel. Then he had to edit all of that into a video for sale to people who enjoyed watching this kind of thing.

The video looked so good even Tech had been impressed. Tech hoped never to do that again, but it sold. Alpha gave Tech money for more equipment, plus a full share, as if he were one of the pack making the kills with them.

Alpha had proven to be an openly honest businessperson. He showed Tech the sales figures, breaking down the money they took in and what went where. Everyone knew how much everyone got for their part in it, and it was more money than Tech knew possible. There was a huge market for this stuff.

The old microphone was off, and Tech slipped on the new one. It required no calibration or aiming, so Tech packed up and meandered through the forest to the next microphone.

This one had been zip-tied to the branch of one of the fake trees. Tech paused and studied it. The thing looked as if one of the wolves had tried to take a bite out of it. Tech set the bag down, pulled a pair of clippers from it, and cut the zip-tie.

Since that first kill, Tech had spent his days mounting and calibrating new cameras. Running wire required a lot of crawling through dirty spaces, drilling holes, and feeding it through. He often spent the night in the warehouse to expand the coverage. Some of the pack even helped him. They had liked him back then. Now the wolves seemed to look down on the rat, Beta being the most aggressive about it.

They were up to fifteen cameras now. Between kills, Tech replaced damaged equipment, cleaned blood off lenses and microphones, ran wire, adjusted lights, and cleaned and rearranged the landscape. He had even insulated the walls, both to cut down on the echo, and to prevent noise from leaking outside. How nobody noticed this warehouse, Tech had no idea. He suspected Alpha had bribed some people who wanted in on this, but Tech had never asked.

The rat was lighting, sound, camera, set designer, director, and editor. He credited himself in the vids as “Tech,” and the name stuck. Alpha had told him he was famous in certain circles, and if he was interested, he’d introduce him to those circles. Tech had said no every time, insisting he didn’t want to go too far into this.

The new microphone was mounted, attached, and wired to the system. Tech dropped the broken mic into the bag with the other. He pulled out the old camera and navigated through the forest back to the control room.

Alpha was still in his chair, his eyes on the monitor showing one of the top-level cameras looking down on the part of the warehouse where Tech had been working. Tech wasn’t threatened by this. The wolves always made sure he didn’t leave with any pieces of video or other evidence. It was unlikely anyone would be convicted for these videos, as the wolves painted their fur with different patterns and colors before going on the hunt, and the law usually required scent identification, but just in case, they left nobody alone in this warehouse.

Tech handed the broken camera to Alpha. The wolf took it, looked it over.

“I’ll pull up the feed,” said the rat. “I think he smacked it on purpose.”

“I already did. Fourth did take out the camera. Third and Sixth got the microphones.”

“Need more of a punishment than just sitting out a hunt to watch me work.”

Alpha rocked back and forth a couple times, tenting his hands in front of his muzzle. “Did you notice them in the forest?”

Tech stiffened. “I didn’t see anyone.”

Alpha clicked the mouse a few times. Now the rat leaned over the wolf’s shoulder and watched. There he was, in high definition color, stripping wires and mounting the camera. The matrix of video feeds showed every angle possible all around the factory. The fourth wolf was crouching behind a tree, watching Tech. The third wolf was also in the forest, behind a rock, scenting the rat from a distance. And the fifth. And the sixth, seventh, and eighth.

The rat on the screen finished mounting and aiming the camera, then moved through the forest to the microphone. The pack had surrounded him, advancing from tree to tree, closer and closer. The naked, helpless rat knelt and replaced the microphone as a pack of wolves closed in. A few microphones had picked up tongues licking muzzles.

Bag in hand, the rat on camera walked to the second microphone. The wolves followed, so close they could reach out and touch Tech, and the rat never noticed. Two wolves, Seven and Five, were right behind him while he knelt and replaced the equipment, almost breathing down his neck, teeth bared. The poor rat remained oblivious.

Then the rat gathered his tools and walked to the control room. The wolves followed him, stalking him through the trees and behind the rocks but never making themselves known.

Alpha stopped the video, turned in the chair, and faced him directly. Tech backed away a step, shivering.

“Funny thing about being in a pack,” Alpha said. “You start to see everyone who isn’t in it as walking meat. I’ve been keeping them back for weeks, but I don’t think I can hold them anymore.”

Tech’s gut was empty, but it still rose to the back of his throat.

“I don’t wanna lose you, Tech. I like you. I like you a lot. But it’s too serious to think I can stop it from happening. Until you prove you’re one of us, you’re just meat. Even I feel it. So here’s an idea.”

Tech heard claws clicking on tile. He smelled the rest of the pack standing at the door to the control room, all eyes pointed straight at the back of his head. Alpha rose from the chair and walked into Tech’s personal space, holding eye contact. Tech looked up to meet his eyes.

“You’re not going home tonight. The pack will find another rat.” He smiled. “We’ll make sure it has light-colored fur. You won’t eat for a week. You won’t sleep. Neither will your prey. Then we’ll dump the two of you on opposite sides of the forest and put some meat in the middle. You know what rats used to do to each other when there wasn’t enough food?”

Tech dropped the bag. He really was shivering. Alpha held his shoulder, standing much too close for comfort.

“Relax, Tech. Once you taste the kill, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.”

Tech shivered harder under the wolf’s hand. “I don’t want to be like you.”

Alpha smiled. “I think you do. That’s why you’re still here.”

“I need a job! Nobody’s hiring and I need money!”

“I didn’t assign people to sit here and watch you work just to punish them for breaking microphones. I told them to break equipment so we could observe you. I’ve seen it myself. The way you watch us when we’re making kills… You need that trashcan because you’re afraid of yourself.”

Tech clenched his teeth. “This is hell!”

“I knew you enjoyed it the day I showed you that first video. Anyone else would have bolted out the door and never talked to me again, but you stayed. You watched more. You feel it. You watch those people, and you want to let yourself go, too. That’s why I gave you the job.”

“I am not… I do this shit because I have nowhere else to go! I hate it! I hate coming here and watching you!”

“I don’t believe that. You’ve wanted to ask me for months if you could try it, haven’t you? You stare at those cameras, and you wonder what it’s like. Just the thought… All you had to do was ask, and you can feel it, too.”

Tech couldn’t catch his breath as he convulsed. Alpha rested a hand on Tech’s other shoulder.

“Tell me, Tech. What’s on your mind? Why are you still here? Do you want to?”

Tech shook under the wolf’s grip. He couldn’t tell if Alpha was speaking, or if Tech was talking to himself. Realizing this held him in place. Hearing someone else speak his innermost thoughts was more terrifying than being surrounded by wolves covered in the blood of their latest kill. Still shaking, he stood straight and looked straight into Alpha’s eyes. All he could manage was a whisper.

“Please.”

Alpha smiled. “I knew you were one of us.” Alpha turned him around and faced the rest of the pack. “It’s time to show them you’re not prey. We’ll clean up and start making tapes while you’re getting ready. I’ll run the cameras this time. Do you have any idea what people will pay to see two rats tearing each other apart? I’ve never found a kill vid of that!”

Tech had forgotten how big these wolves were, and all of them were covered in elk blood. They were still hunting him.

“You’ve never been in the rec room have you?” said Alpha. “Come with us. It’s time to join the pack.”

Alpha led him by the middle of his back into the midst of the wolves. Tech walked with them down the stairs and through the forest. He looked from side to side. He was in the middle of a pack of eight, large wolves who had tasted the kill and enjoyed it.

As Tech walked, his nerves calmed. He expected to feel anxiety, knowing what lay ahead, but instead he felt relief that he wasn’t meat.

The pack moved as one, thought as one, killed as one, and now Tech was among them. That could be him, too. His mind explored the possibility, and he expected to dry heave, but it did not happen this time. Instead, he pondered that soon he would experience how it felt to act without consequences. By the time he stepped into the rec room with the pack, he had stopped shivering. He now smiled in anticipation.

 

* * *

About the Author

James L. Steele is a writer in Ohio. He is often asked to sum up his life’s story in a single paragraph. James is very depressed by how easy this is. He is the author of Huvek, available through FurPlanet, and the Archeons series, through KTM Publishing.

Visit his blog at DaydreamingInText.blogspot.com, and his twitter @JLSteeleauthor

by Elinor Caiman Sands

“You stop in mid stride, jaws open. Everyone is turning, pointing and yelling, running away from you.”

A: You haven’t eaten for two months so you creep up slowly through the steaming manhole, claws grasping the concrete, and step out onto the busy sidewalk. Here the lights of Manhattan are overwhelming, as is the stinky traffic and horrible indigestible donut smells. It’s really not a nice place to be. But you’re soooo terribly hungry. Got to try something; you’re way too young and too little to go to the great swamp in the sky.

So what do you want to do? Choose B if—yay!—you want to try nomming a passing tourist. Their tasty-looking ankles scurry in every direction. They smell soooo delicious. Choose C if that’s too scary and much better to go back down into the sewer.

* * *

 B: A yummy-looking man with “I love NYC” t-shirt and khaki shorts lingers not six feet away on the sidewalk, obviously a tourist. He’s stopped to take a photograph and is gazing up wide-eyed at the skyscrapers; he hasn’t noticed you at all.  So you sidle closer past a stern-looking woman in a green suit. At first the woman doesn’t notice you, but then she does. And screams.

You stop in mid stride, jaws open. Everyone is turning, pointing and yelling, running away from you.

The delicious man dashes into a nearby department store as you snap at his heels, while wailing sirens echo down the street. Several NYPD squad cars pull up and a bevy of policemen pour out reaching for their guns.

You flee north along Seventh Avenue, dodging yellow taxis and fire trucks which are now also chasing you.  You pass a store called “Lacoste.” Its logo looks a lot like you—a friendly creature—how wonderful! Perhaps you should trundle in and seek sanctuary as rather a lot of burly men are tumbling out of a nearby fire truck waving poles and duct tape. But maybe not, as the store is still run by humans, and humans don’t seem to like you.

Though you’re getting terribly weary now. You stop by a newsstand and spot another manhole. It’s far from the one where you started but somehow you sneak your claws beneath the rim and prise off the lid. Slithering back down to the dank tunnel below feels soooo good.

You exhale a deep bellows sigh. What a horrible experience. Better never try that again, no matter how hungry, no matter how nice it was to see the sun. Humans really don’t like you.

Better go to C.

* * *

C: It seems like the sewer you call home really is the only option. Fortunately there are plenty of nice dank tunnels down here so you wander off in search of yummies. And hello, what’s this? A funny-shaped log with scales floating in the murk? But no, it’s Aunt Agatha, huge and ancient and covered in grime and algae, and she’s nomming a tasty fishy. Actually, she’s not that big really or even that old—your kind used to get so much larger once—but she’s way bigger than you are, and not nearly as friendly.

Yet the fishy smells sooo good. And your belly is rumbling: so very hungry.

What do you want to do? Go to D to try to steal it, though she doubtless won’t give it up so easy.

Or just sigh, go to E and let Aunt Agatha eat in peace. Considering her age, size and foul temper it might be best to leave her be.

* * *

D: Aunt Agatha lays in the gloom of the tunnel, nomming the beautiful fat, silvery fishy. Aunt Agatha’s jaws are huge and extra elongated and super warty and still have more than enough teeth; but you’re sooo very hungry. So you sidle towards the cunning old reptile with your most winning smile. Then you make a quick dash forward. You try to seize the fishy in your much smaller jaws. But Aunt Agatha turns. She takes a little sidestep. She smacks you smartly on the snout with her tail. Ouch! Then she swivels and flees into the darkness. The old girl is gone, and so is her dinner. So much for that idea. Go to E.

* * *

E: This appears to be a dead end. How boring. It looks kind of familiar too. Surely you’re not going in circles? Never mind, must just keep traipsing along; plenty of fish in the sea. At least, there used to be.

Dinner will turn up soon, surely; something will come along before you suffer the same fate as the American Crocodile.

Go to C, F or H. It doesn’t really matter which. Every choice will bring you to H eventually. But might as well be alphabetical: so go to F.

* * *

F: There must be some food along these tunnels somewhere. You’re really getting ravenous now. You’ll eat almost anyone. You mean anything. Erm. Wait, what’s this wooden crate? A label on the side reads: “Certified Environmentally Sustainable.” Something is also scratched there in the old scaly tongue. In the gloom it reads: FISH YUM YUMMY FISHY DINNER AGATHA. (English translation: Aunt Agatha’s personal larder. Claws off.)

Your eyes widen and your belly starts to rumble even louder. But what are you going to do? There must be fish inside, but Aunt Agatha surely wouldn’t be happy if you nommed all her tasty dinners. She’s already in a pretty foul mood, surely.

Go to G if you want to smash the box and tuck in anyway.

Go to H if you are too scared. Aunt Agatha might chomp you into pieces and put you in the crate as well, and you’re far too young to go to the great swamp in the sky.

* * *

G: You are so incredibly, insanely hungry by now you seize the wooden crate and throw it into the brick wall where it splinters into several pieces. Tins of Scottish Farmed Salmon roll out, lots of them. How wonderful! You pounce on the nearest can and chomp down on it, ignoring the taste of blood on your tongue as the tin buckles and you cut your mouth on the sharp human-made metal. You can smell the heavenly fish as your enormous mouth waters; you’re almost there. But just as you’re about to chomp down once more, a mighty hissing comes from behind. It’s Aunt Agatha come to check on her hoard. Oh no! She doesn’t look happy. She rushes towards you with jaws open. She’s vast, perhaps twelve feet long, four times your length. The tin clatters to the ground, and you flee as fast as your little legs will carry you. Fortunately you are much nimbler than old Aunt Agatha, so you make your escape, though you are still unbelievably hungry. Your belly aches, it’s so empty. Go to H.

* * *

H: Eventually exhaustion overcomes you and you stop running. You’re not so strong anymore, not to mention way too hungry; your beloved sewer is just an endless warren of barren brick. You keep trudging along although it’s starting to smell worse as well. You haven’t been this way for many a year, but you don’t remember it ever being this vile.

You lope around a bend and there it is, the source of the terrible stench: a giant, oozing fatberg. Your jaw drops at the white gloopy mass of human waste, grease and wet wipes that blocks the passage from floor to ceiling. You gag so much you have to stop breathing. Fortunately you can hold your breath for a very long time.

You’ve heard these things exist in other cities but how dreadful to find one in New York. Your heart aches though you’ve never been one to rail against the world; and you no longer have that kind of energy.

No more progress can be made this way. Go back to A.

* * *

What are you still doing here? You should be back at A. Yes you’ve run out of sewer to explore but you’re not the type to give up. Keep going, there’s always possibilities.

Yet you are practically starving now. Your legs are so weak they’ll barely lift you; your eyelids droop with weariness. You want to weep great crocodile tears, but you’re not, strictly speaking, a crocodile, so that would be unseemly. Instead you tramp along the tunnels struggling to keep your chin up, belly rumbling.

A hundred years ago, so the old tales said, life was so much easier. Then your kind lived much further south, and basked in the sunlight, and swam in heavenly fish-filled swamps. But those days are only dreams. Just have to make the best of life as it is.

There’s a bright light ahead; all sunshine and blue skies at the end of the tunnel, but it can’t be. You blink your nictitating lids and drag your long little body that’s so heavy now towards the light. At the exit a great stretch of water, dotted with mangrove trees, water lilies and pretty white snowy egrets teems with wonderful fishies. Your eyes go wide. It’s paradise.

You step out into the brilliance and slip into the water. Soon the sun on your back is making your scales tingle. You’re starting to feel strong again. You move to snatch up one of the tasty fishies but then you stop—you’re not hungry. All your life you’ve been hungry. But now the terrible gnawing ache is just a memory, and even that is fading. You’re free at last.

A log floats by. Hollow logs litter the banks all around. Might as well stretch out and bask as your kind were always meant to. This is sooo much better than living in a sewer. You smile—of course you do. You’re always smiling. Except this time it’s from the heart.

 

* * *

About the Author

When she’s not sleeping, or chasing fishy dinners in her alligator guise, Elinor Caiman Sands writes science fiction from her secret location in a chilly English swamp. She’s had short fiction published in the Defying Doomsday anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists (from Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press); the Strange Bedfellows anthology of political science fiction (Bundoran Press) as well in Cosmos Online and elsewhere.

She can be found at: https://ecaimansands.com/ and on Twitter @ECaimanSands (her “serious” author account) and @Daisy_the_Gator (Gator’s account). When a gator, she invariably claims to be a huge one, but she really isn’t, as human Elinor isn’t a very large person, being a dwarf, as you can see from the photo.

Welcome to Issue 11 of Zooscape!

When the world is crushing in all around, what do you do?  How do you survive?  Perhaps, you find an animal to lead the way, or an animal to stay close by your side.  Or maybe, to survive the pain, you turn into an animal yourself.

These stories are profiles of characters surviving in the space between their worst fears and their greatest hopes; characters surviving pain, making choices, and letting themselves discover the animal inside.

* * *

The Sewers of New York by Elinor Caiman Sands

The Tech by James L. Steele

Puss Reboots by Rachel Ayers

Persinette by Elizabeth Walker

Him Without Her and Her Within Him by Aimee Ogden

A List of Historical Places Frequented by a Boy and His Dog by Eleanor R. Wood

Miss Smokey by Diana A. Hart

Palmerino’s Dream by Joana Galbraith

* * *

ANNOUNCEMENT TIME!

Big changes are happening at Zooscape.  Our mission is to share the wonder of furry fiction with the world and help get furry recognized as the legitimate genre of fiction that it already is.  To that end, we are doing some restructuring, helping to move us toward the goal of becoming a SFWA qualifying market.  This means:

1)  Starting with the December 2021 issue, our pay rates will increase to 8 cents/word for original fiction with no payment cap.  As our September issue is already locked down, every new story we accept from now on will be paid at pro rates.

2)  In order to pay for this increase in rates, we will be going back to our original plan of three issues per year.  We plan to publish on December 15th, April 15th, and August 15th.

3)  Depending on how these changes affect the flow of submissions, we may have to make additional changes to our slush reading schedule.  However, for now, we will wait and see what changes seem most likely to be helpful.

We are once again open to submissions!  And we’d love to see a story from you.

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, check out our Patreon.

Today we have the pleasure of having the award-winning author J. Malan, aka Erdbok / Erdwolf, talking about his new book, Rekindled. We talk about the setting of the book, what to expect from him in the future, and the process of writing in the current climate. You can pre-order his new book from Goal Publications here: https://www.goalpublications.com/store/p142/rekindled-paperback.html Follow him on Twitter here! https://twitter.com/Erdwolf_TVL Find us on Twitter: @South-Afrifur, https://twitter.com/southafrifur, on Tumblr, http://south-afrifur.tumblr.com/, and on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/southafrifur Also, for more local news, check out the Zafur forums! http://forum.zafur.co.za/

Ah, welcome to the May edition of digging up positivity. Slowly the world is recovering. All over the world we see events starting up again and I look forward to the moment I can travel again and see my friends abroad. This episode we have several events, both virtual and ‘classic’, raising money for charity, […]

Okay, here’s something that snuck up on on us: Stitch and the Samurai, a new Disney spinoff manga written and illustrated by Hiroto Wada. “While fleeing the Galactic Federation, Stitch’s spaceship malfunctions and he makes an emergency landing… not in Hawaii, but in sengoku-era Japan! Discovered by the brutal warlord Lord Yamato and his clan, Stitch’s incomparable cuteness is no match for the battle-weary samurai, who decides to bring the ‘blue tanuki’ home with him. Will Stitch’s love of chaos turn into a formidable advantage for the samurai’s influence? Or will his cute and fluffy form disarm the noble lord’s stern façade?” In other words, is the noble lord a stupid-head? Find out now at TokyoPop.

image c. 2021 TokyoPop

This week!

Fiesta 2022 hotel! Drugs, they're good! PRIDE DISCOURSE! Vaccines are also good! Fursuit makers making bank.. good! And more bronies coming out as trans, which is good too.

Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/Southpawscast 

IMPORTANT LINKS
The big Pride history thread we reference - https://twitter.com/vaspider/status/1397709284603879428
Vaccines, a measured response by HBomberguy -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc

Less important but still fun links -
Telegram fan chat - https://t.me/joinchat/P2iJg8tyj-KNGaci 

Episode 492 - Pride(TM) - This week!Fiesta 2022 hotel! Drugs, they're good! PRIDE DISCOURSE! Vaccines are also good! Fursuit makers making bank.. good! And more bronies coming out as trans, which is good too.Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/Southpawscas

MOOBARKFLUFF! Click here to send us a comment or message about the show!

Special guest Cocadope joins us this week and talks with us about his life in the fandom, his artwork, and other things. Taebyn sings us a very interesting song then Taebyn's hubby; Tatsu, tells us about some Japanese word pronunciations, Bearly reads a particularly grim Grimms Fairytail, and we throw some trivia questions at Taebyn.  Join us for a rip roaring good time on this weeks show. Moobarkfluff.

Support the show

Thanks to all our listeners and to our staff: Bearly Normal, Rayne Raccoon, Taebyn, Cheetaro, TickTock, and Ziggy the Meme Weasel.

You can send us a message on Telegram at BFFT Chat, or via email at: bearlyfurcasting@gmail.com

Bearly Furcasting S2E5 - Cocadope, Taebyn Words and a Song, A Grimm Fairy tale, Trivia

No North is a brand new web comic that’s just getting started. It’s written and illustrated by the animator Raquel Simoso, also known as Skailla. There’s a preview video over on YouTube, along with several of Skailla’s other projects. No North is Old West adventure, mystery, and magic — with dogs! “Inspired by classic animal fables, traditionally animated movies, and every old west adventure you can imagine, this story came to life with the support of fans from around the world.” Take a look over at the official web site.

image c. 2021 by Raquel Simoso

There’s a few days left to nominate a furry for the 2021 Good Furry Award!

The award recognizes furries who show the best side of the fandom or work to help others. In 2020, The Fandom documentary maker Ash Coyote won, after Tony “Dogbomb” Barrett in 2019. A trophy and $500 goes to the winner, to be announced by Grubbs Grizzly on his “Ask Papabear” website in June. To help you decide, there’s a list of nominees that makes a good read about furry happenings. More than thirty nominees are eligible for your vote now.

Have you seen or heard anything furry in 2021 that might deserve an Ursa Major Award? 

You can suggest it now for the 2021 Recommended Anthropomorphics List! The list is a guide (but not the limit) for who may deserve an award nomination at the end of the year.

Last month all of last year’s Ursa Major Award winners were announced on YouTube.

The winners:

• Best Motion Picture: Wolfwalkers (Cartoon Saloon, Mélusine)
  Runners-up: Sonic the Hedgehog – Soul – Onward – Hayop Ka!
• Best Dramatic Short Work: ZooPhobia – “Bad Luck Jack” (Vivziepop)
  Runners-up: “The Humiliation of Jinjur Maiham” – “Burrow” – “Mystery Skulls Animated” – “Trick Moon”
• Best Dramatic Series: Beastars (U.S. release of the English dub, Season 1)
  Runners-up: Helluva Boss – Aggretsuko – BNA: Brand New Animal – Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts
• Best Short Fiction: “What Makes a Witch”, by Linnea Capps (Weasel Press)
  Runners-up: “Summer Strawberries” – “Familiar” – “The Glow” – “Tittilating Trivia”
• Best Other Literary Work: Difursity: Stories by Furries of Color, edited by Weasel (anthology, Bound Tales Press/Thurston Howl)
  Runners-up: Blacksad: The Collected Stories – Tales of Hayven Celestia – Selections of Anthropomorphic Regalements, Vol. 1 – Bush Heroes
• Best Non-Fiction Work: The Fandom: A Furry Documentary, directed by Ash Kreis & Eric Risher
  Runners-up: The Last Bronycon – From Paw To Print – The Best and Worst Anthro Movies – Furries Among Us 3
• Best Novel: The City That Barks and Roars, by J.T. Bird (self-published)
  Runners-up: On The Mark – Entanglement Bound – Disbanded – Spin the Bottle
• Best Graphic Story: Beastars, by Paru Itagaki (manga, English translation, Vol. 4-9)
  Runners-up: Shine – Found – A&H Club – Oren’s Forge
• Best Comic Strip: Housepets!, by Rick Griffin (Jan. 1 – Dec. 30)
  Runners-up: Carry On – Freefall – Doc Rat – The Whiteboard
• Best Magazine: Pocari Roo’s videos
  Runners-up: Dogpatch Press – Furry Writers’ Guild – Flayrah – Zooscape
• Best Website: Fur Affinity
  Runners-up: SoFurry – Loona – Furry Life Online – Stolas
• Best Published Illustration: “Cheers” (by Lofi)
  Runners-up: “A Night At The Fair” – “Paintwork” – “Sir Monty, The Good Boy” – “Take Off Your Headset!!”
• Best Game: Animal Crossing: New Horizons (developer and publisher: Nintendo)
  Runners-up: Ori and the Will of the Wisps – Spiritfarer – Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time – Them’s Fightin’ Herds
• Best Anthropomorphic Costume (Fursuit): Zigc the Khajiit – maker: Inerri Creatures; owner, wearer: Zigc.
  Runners-up: Toriel – Cassidy Civet – Inutami Luki the Saluki – Xif

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Nearly three years ago we told you about Solo: Survivors of Chaos, the premier graphic novel from award-winning cartoonist Oscar Martin (Tom & Jerry comics). Well this summer, Mr. Martin returns with Solo Volume 2! “Warner Bros Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Oscar Martin, creates a unique dystopian world of chaos, where every day is a fight to survive. In a future ravaged by nuclear wars, the Earth has given birth to an array of new mutated species, which have grown and repopulated the land. But this new world is far from peaceful, and life in it is often short and brutal…” Find out more when Solo Volume 2 hits the shelves this June, in hardcover from Titan Comics.

image c. 2021 Titan Comics

“The Visitors” officially knits together two of Royce Day’s long-running series about fox-like extraterrestrials into a single timeline: The steampunk/alternate world war “Prisoners of War” series and space pirate romance “The Red Vixen Adventures.” There were hints that they were in the same universe previously and names in common, but this was the first book to establish concrete connections. Aside from a framing device in which an RVA-era foxen noble discovers a secret journal written by one of his ancestors, “The Visitors” takes place thirty years after the first “Prisoners of War” story. Rolas Darktail (who shares his descendant’s name) has retired from military service and is now part of the Mother Country’s rocketry program, liaising with the Gerwartians he used to fight. One day, he gets a surprise visit from his former commanding officer, now in the intelligence service, who makes an impossible and nonsensical demand of them. Attempting to suss why the higher-ups in the government are demanding such things, Rolas encounters a group of strange beings whose very existence will change the course of history on Foxen Prime. You can see one of them on the cover. “The Visitors” presents a rather significant tonal shift from the other books in the series, while they touched on pretty dark material as well, there’s no erotic interludes here. Aside from the prologue and epilogue, which are told in third person, “The Visitors” is in first person as it’s supposed to be a journal. Changing up narrative mode is rare and can be hard to pull off, but it works here. Though I would have liked to see a more epistolary format with perhaps more of Rolas’ coded letters to his wife. I couldn’t bring myself to see things from Reggie’s point of view; he just seems irrationally xenophobic in his response to the Visitors, though that might be the point given that he’s turned to alcohol as a coping mechanism for his PTSD and the loss of his wife. His judging them based on some footage of Auschwitz seems a bit hypocritical given that he fought his own species’ equivalent of Nazi Germany, which was reinforced when a character from said country recognized the context of the footage, a reminder to not let it happen again. But as someone who lives in a country with lots of skeletons in the closet that many people pretend never happened, the foxen and human governments’ ultimate decision to cover up the actual events, for 500 years, hit me kind of hard. If you’re an existing fan of Royce’s writing, or just want to check out a good First Contact story from the non-humans’ perspectives, take a look at “The Visitors.”

The Visitors, by Royce Day

TigerTails Radio Season 13 Episode 13 - Jump to 04:38 for the start. Join the Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/SQ5QuRf For a full preview of events and for previous episodes, please visit http://www.tigertailsradio.co.uk. See website for full breakdown of song credits, which is usually updated shortly after the show.