Scorched

Word count: 750

Scorched

I do not have time for this.

The dragon’s leathery wings wrap over its body and my finger; it snarls at me as I try to shake it off. The talons scratch the skin beneath my gold ring. A tiny wisp of smoke wafts up from its nostrils.

“Get off,” I mutter, its body heat scorching my finger. It purrs and clings tighter.

I open the drawer of the till and hold it over it, shaking it a little, closer to the scattering of gold coins in the till.

“You little—” I should be opening the shop doors, not prying a dragon off my finger. Can’t customers be more responsible with what’s in their bags?

It spots the gold in the till and flops into it. Grabbing the nearest coin between its claws, it rolls over and hugs them to its smooth, snakelike belly. A plume of smoke rises from its nostrils.

Just another problem, I think, twisting my ring as I open the shop. Getting the little beastie out of the till at the end of the day will be difficult.

My apprentice does not appear before the supply caravan comes. I snap my account book closed. This shop is more trouble than it’s worth, sometimes.

It takes the whole day to settle the new inventory in the shop, indulge the camel drivers’ trading customs, and get them back on the road. Thankfully, no one comes to the shop. My apprentice still does not appear.

I reenter the shop and groan.

The dragon. Now cat-sized, it sits among the splintered shards of my till, its talons full of gold coins. It looks up and coos as I stop dead in the middle of the floor.

It is angry when I try to pick it up; gold rustles against its belly as it gathers the small pile beneath it. Its teeth have grown appreciably. It sneezes, catching a whiff of the peppercorns I spilled on myself, and a lick of flame darts from its mouth.

I think of my father-in-law, who helped train the battle dragons in his day. He could help me get this thing out of my shop. But it is dark now, and he will be abed. A thought flashes through my mind and I watch the dragon contentedly lower its head to the floor.

I dig out my secret stash of gold, the small bag I keep for emergencies. The dragon’s head pops up as I jingle the coins. It cocks its head like a puppy. Then, like a puppy chasing a bug, it pounces, bounding into the storeroom after the bag of gold, and I close it in and leave it for the night.

The sun rises on the ruin of my life.

The dragon sits in a smoking pile of charred wood and embers, steam rising from its sides into the air. Abandoned buckets lay scattered among the ruins.

            It happened quickly, they tell me. Just before sunup. Someone heard a terrible sound, and a moment later the building was afire. It lasted about an hour, not even enough time to come fetch me.

I should be devastated. I pick my way through the steaming embers and come face-to-face with the dragon.

It growls softly, its teeth half-hidden by the thin cloud of smoke hanging above its head.

“You bastard,” I whisper to it. It looks me in the eye. I would almost swear it smiles. Beneath it lies the small hoard of gold I kept in the shop—all of it. One look at the dragon’s eyes and I know it won’t leave the hoard alone. No way I’m getting that back. It’s almost as large as me, now that it has been sitting on the gold overnight, and I don’t dare approach it closely enough to get my gold back.

Thank goodness that wasn’t everything. I look it in the eye again. It rumbles deep in its throat.

“Keep it,” I say.

The little dragon that started off no bigger than my finger has grown as large as me and ruined my business. I regret the shop a little—my father built it from the ground up when he was my age. But I do not regret it that much. Not enough to rebuild.

The soft, contented growl of the dragon echoes softly off the walls of the buildings as I head down the street toward home. Time to start over. Somewhere new. Somewhere exciting. Somewhere profitable.

Time to start over.

Barnacles

Word Count: 1200

Barnacles

Bailey cursed as the thin edge of the shell bit deep into the side of his hand. Snatching a dirty piece of cloth, he dabbed at the blood that bubbled up. It stung.

Holding the stained cloth to his hand, Bailey sat down heavily on a piling. The endless curve of the ship’s hull, like the soft swell of a shoulder or back, rose high above his head. At his feet, tiny whispers of the highest tide lapped. Shore birds waded in the water, searching for food. A few stood a hundred feet away, washing in and out with the waves, eyeing the slowly growing pile of barnacles and sea debris at Bailey’s feet.

“Whales carry barnacles. They swim just fine.” Bailey squinted up. A few feet above his head, the waterline ended. A crew had removed at least half the barnacles during the week. Now, Saturday, they had dragged him out of his bed and ordered him to continue the job. He picked up his scraper with aching fingers laced with half a dozen other cuts and went back to work.

A light breeze brushed through his hair and fluttered the heavy sheets of canvas hanging above. They’d done a terrible job of furling the sails and the heavy canvas flapped against the side of the boat. The breeze brought the faintest whiff of salt and sea, but also a heavy musty scent of fish and slime. Winter was coming, and the docks, usually teeming with life and encrusted with ships, stretched empty into the harbor.

Bailey’s scraper slipped again; swearing, he flung it down and smashed it beneath the heel of his boot as brilliant red stained his fingers.

At this rate, his hands would still be out of commission and useless for the sails when they headed back to sea next week. If only he were in charge instead of that stupid, half-drunk--

Bailey cut himself off, frowning. “Bloody idiot.”

A few hundred feet away, two figures emerged from the huddle of huts and customs houses on the shore. They had the rolling gait of inveterate seamen who had not recovered their land legs after a week on shore and probably never would. The two of them sauntered side by side down the longest dock and stood at the end, staring out over the rolling water into a horizon flat and empty and endless. The soft movement of the waves carried their words like a piece of driftwood directly to Bailey’s ears as he slumped on his piling.

“We’re really casting off next week?”

“He says we can make it.”

“Do you know what ye need to make the next set of islands, Davis? Fresh water and fair weather! Not grog.”

“The grog is for morale. You of all people ought--”

“What does he think we’re doing, dancing drunk till midnight?”

Bailey gave a little jump as he recognized the resonant voice of the speaker, adapted to carry over the wind in a storm, as the first mate. His partner would be Davis, Captain O’Hara’s clerk. Everything in his body suddenly attuned to the soft noise across the waves.

The first mate spoke again.

“What is the temper of the cabin?”

“It’s hard to tell.”

“Give us an estimate, then.”

Davis dropped his voice and Bailey couldn’t make out the rest. He wobbled on his piling and realized he’d been leaning toward them.

“...five days,” the first mate said, gesturing toward the horizon. A thin bank of clouds was building at the edge of the sea.

“...three days out of port.”

“We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Two days, perhaps.”

Bailey stood as the voices trailed off. Deliberately, he swept the fragments of his scraper to the ground beneath the dry dock. They clinked against rocks covered in dry, stiff sea moss. He walked to the end of the dock, the vast clumsy bulk of the ship rising behind him, and looked out.

“It’s our duty,” the first mate was saying.

“Can you rely on your men?”

“All of them. And you?”

A quiet sound of assent.

“...the winter. I guarantee, once he sobers up, he’ll thank us.”

A handshake. More silence. The first mate reached down and scooped up a handful of water, letting it run out between cupped fingers. A flurry of breeze snatched spray from the tops of the waves, bringing a sudden chill and a heavy smell of rain and lightning that was gone almost before Bailey could identify it. He shivered.

Since he was a boy, he had dreamed of overhearing plans just like this. He had dwelt on the thrill it brought him to imagine saving an entire ship and its crew, defending the captain at all costs from a few desperate mutineers.

Davis and the mate walked back down the dock toward the tiny town. Bailey watched them go, picturing Captain O’Hara. He’d hardly seen the man on the last leg of this voyage--but he’d heard him, wailing mournful sea songs from behind his cabin door late into the night. He’d felt the man’s presence as the ship wallowed in the last storm, tight sails humming in the wind and threatening to break.

Bailey looked up at the bulk of the ship’s hull, discolored and still crusted with patches of barnacles.
He had never sailed under such an incompetent captain before. Yet in all his boyhood fantasies, he had never imagined himself taking the side of the mutineers.

Another gust of wind brought the scent of rain to his nose, and it lingered this time.

He turned back, arms crossed as he headed back up the dock toward his lodging. At the end of the dock, leaning on a cane, stood a tall, bearded figure. Captain O’Hara.

Bailey stopped in his tracks. The captain had not noticed him. The words he had just heard flashed through his brain with white-hot intensity. Then the face of his father, waving farewell from the dock at home.

Take care of him, his father had said.

For the life of him, Bailey did not understand what his father saw in Captain O’Hara, but he trusted him.

Captain O’Hara spotted him and waved his cane. Even at a distance, Bailey could see the brilliant white teeth that split the beard in a smile. He waved back. Maybe the captain knew already. But perhaps he did not. He did not know what the crew was planning. Maybe the man’s life was in danger.

Maybe not.

Bailey put his hands in his pockets and resumed his walk up the dock as casually as he could.

“Ahoy, Bailey! Seaworthy yet?”

“Not yet, sir,” Bailey said, worried his voice would give him away.

“Get her ready! We sail Sunday!”

This close, Bailey could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Sir, I’m not sure--”

“Sunday, Bailey! The next port awaits us. By the way--have you seen Davis?”

Bailey took a deep breath.

“No, sir.”

“Hm. Haven’t been able to find him today.” Captain O’Hara turned and, leaning on his cane, made his way back toward the town.

Bailey bit his tongue and watched him go.

Illicit

Word count: 920

Illicit

When she’d left the apartment, the silent eye contact with her roommate was all they needed—a tacit thanks, just in case. She waited to zip up her tattered suit until she was in the hallway. The less her roommate knew, the better.

Standing in a short alley, she adjusted her dingy cloth mask that itched behind her ears. Her protective suit lay in a crumpled pile against the wall. As she peeled off her second-to-last pair of latex gloves and carefully dropped them into a plastic bag for safekeeping, the cool night air felt toxic and intoxicating.

Behind her, a raccoon quietly rooted through a pile of food scraps in a dumpster. It didn’t even know she was there.

She took a deep breath of air that smelled like sterile fabric and old breath, her boots crunching softly over broken glass as she moved back to the front of the alley and waited.

Hers was a dangerous job. The Conflict had soured the air, leaving lingering traces of chemicals hanging in the air. It was no longer safe to be outside without protection, they were told. Those who did venture out passed each other on opposite sides of the street, heads down, and patrols of policemen in heavy protective gear patrolled the streets. People looked at each other through tightly closed windows—no one could regulate looking—and remembered back through endless days to the time before, when they brushed past one another on the street without a thought, clasping hands and even trading stiff hugs.

People were hungry—so hungry.

She leaned against the wall, hands uncovered in the dangerous air. She could never tell if the tingling on her skin was the air brushing over fine hairs, or wreaths of toxic chemicals slowly killing her. She was hungry, too, perhaps more than the rest of them. Her entire body craved it. Empty, hollow, it waited. The soft scratch of her shirt against her shoulders reminded her how empty she felt, as though her skin were a shell around and empty core waiting to be filled with something warm and life-giving.

Across the street, in a patch of shadow, another figure appeared. He, too, was bare-handed, bare-faced, open to all the silent deadly fury of the open air. A gleam of light glinted off his bald head as he leaned out and acknowledged her with a brief wave, the living brown of his skin a kind of protest.

She waved back, their hands, flickering into the light together, a symbol of solidarity.

She waited for an hour and a half, the emptiness inside pulsing with her breath and heartbeat, as if the craving were a living thing. The breeze across the back of her neck felt like torture. Her stomach was empty, too—they’d spent the last of their money the night before on her roommate’s medication, and the pantry was dangerously empty.

“Hey,” a voice came out of the darkness.

She jumped. How long had she been standing there numb?

“Um…how much?”

She’d heard the question before—someone shy and desperate, uncertain how to ask but ready to risk the patrols for a little contact.

“Twenty for a handshake, a hundred for a minute.”

A shaking hand held out an envelope. Inside, a stack of small bills as big as her hand. Enough for groceries for a week, maybe.

“My mom got sick,” the voice said.

She braced herself, beckoning the owner of the voice, a young woman in the closest homemade approximation of protective gear she’d seen yet, back into the alley. A street down, a siren whooped once and fell silent.

“I haven’t been able to see her since. I’m not sure if she’s—”

They were often like this. Full of their own grief that spilled over when they came. Not that sharing changed anything. Sometimes it made them feel better, though—they had to justify their actions to themselves, or relieve some massive burden.

Satisfied that the patrol was occupied, she beckoned her closer. Touch sent shivers of lightning down her back. The emptiness inside flooded, roiling and bubbling. Breath caught in their throats.

A siren again, closer. Her heart raced. But euphoria rushed through her with the touch of hands on shoulders. They were coming. They would be searching alleys. She could take the money, leave now.

But business had been bad, and in the contact the grief in both their hearts flowed back and forth between them, waking something nearly painful that had been stirring for weeks. Like a hand clenching an electric fence, galvanized solid and unable to free itself, she could not let go.

Tears wet her shoulder and with them fizzed anger, deep and gut-wrenching. It wasn’t their fault that the air was laden with chemicals. It wasn’t their fault that they had to live like this, cut off. She wasn’t even sure it was real. People had to touch, sometime.

She heard the patrol car’s engine starting up as her customer tightened her grip. If a patrol caught you out without protection, there was a fine. Caught out with others—jail time.

Anger seethed. She whispered “they’re coming,” and thickly through tears her customer whispered back “let them come.” So they remained, locked together, filling up, tears trickling as the contact released something long locked up inside.

They remained that way until the first beam of a flashlight shot down the alleyway and the quiet of the deserted night broke beneath the quick, professional footsteps of a patrol.

They Told Me To Write (2 versions)

They Told Me To Write

Jessica M.

They told me to write

Poetry,

That maybe the void in me

Would speak into the darkness,

So I slashed my palm and took my pen

Because it has to be done in blood,

They say,

And in rhyme and meter.

And there are these things called feet

But they aren’t feet

Because in poetry, nothing is what it is,

But all symbols and imagery.

It has to come from a dark place,

They say,

And it must be done in one sitting

Crystallized hard and clear and perfect,

And if it doesn’t reflect the sun

And the stars

And your heart

And your pain

And the bleeding of the world,

It doesn’t count.

But I’m just trying to make it rhyme.



They Told Me To Write (Version 2)

They told me to write

Poetry, so that maybe

The void within me

Would speak in darkness.

So I slash my palm and I

Take my pen and I

Write, because it must

Be done in blood, they say, in

Rhyme and rhythm; when

Words aren’t themselves, it’s

Poetry--nothing is what

It is, but it’s all

Symbols, imagery.

It must come from a dark place

They say, and you race

To write with no stops.

Crystallized, hard, clear, perfect,

Poetry reflects,

Perfectly, the sun

And the stars, your heart, your chains,

The world and its pain,

Or it doesn’t count.

My hand bleeds for a long time,

I must start with rhyme.

Which version did you like better?

I Never Knew

1900 words

I Never Knew

Will you be okay tonight?

I’ll be fine, why wouldn’t I be?

I just don’t want you to be melancholy on your birthday.

You always use the funniest words. Melancholy.

You know what I mean. Call me when you start feeling down.

I’m sitting atop my duvet with a glass of red wine, a blue scrapbook on my lap. Brian left an hour ago, leaving me to wash the dishes in peace. It left me a lot of time to think--to be melancholy.

I’ve just turned thirty, and I’m in the mood for memories. My cat curls up next to my leg, lazily swatting the flicks of sunset light that bounce off the shiny pages as I open the scrapbook. I run my fingers over the sharp edges of the pictures, remembering.

            I open to a grainy old photo. It’s me--skinny, leggy, gap-toothed, my hair in tight pigtails that stick straight out above my ears. I’m clutching a puppy so tightly I can almost see its eyes bugging out. I close my eyes.

****

            I hear his car pulling up in the driveway and I run for the door, eager for him to grab me off my feet and swing me above his head until my wispy hair touches the doorframe. I remember the smell of the sunshine and the hot glare of the pavement outside--it must be July or August. Daddy has his hands behind his back. Suddenly nervous, I stop short.

            “Jamie,” he says, and I hear something in his voice I haven’t heard before. “Jamie--”

            I wait. My mother puts her arms around me from behind. They are cold and her skin is damp from washing. “Jamie,” she says into my ear. “We brought you something. But you have to be very careful with it and take good care of it yourself.”

My father slowly brings his hands out from behind his back. In them sits a squirming puppy, round-bellied and soft, pink skin showing through the fine hair. I open my mouth and squeal so high I stop making noise. I lunge for the puppy and wrap it in my arms, not caring that it squirms. It licks my face and I think I might faint with happiness.      

            My father kneels down, looking straight into my eyes. His eyes are wet as he watches me cuddle the puppy. “Now you’re big enough to have this responsibility. You have to take care of it.”

            “Yes!” I squeal. “She can have a pink collar!”

            Daddy tries to explain to me that Natasha is a boy. But all I remember is Mommy sinking onto the couch, watching us and crying. The sound of her sobs is as real to me as the warm, soft fur on the puppy’s belly. I remember falling asleep that night to soft puppy breaths on my cheek and Mommy’s sobs in the next room.

****

            Before I met Brian, I didn’t know that parents often give their children gifts to cover up the rifts that are growing between them. I never realized that Mom and Dad were moving apart, even then. To me, they were just two proud parents who’d made their little girl very happy.

****

My fingers brush over another picture, bringing back a sharp smell of disinfectant and white tile. People are everywhere--tall, gangly kids in braces and graphic tees and too-short pants, short, childish kids in braces with spiky hair. Puffs of perfume and cologne assault my nose. I hold my two thin spiral notebooks close to my chest, trying to hide the growing sweat stains I feel under my arms, as I search the endless progression of tiny metal plaques for my room number.

            I find it. The teacher is tall and has his hair slicked back, wearing a tee shirt and jeans with sneakers. He smiles at me as I walk in and I feel myself blushing. I smile back and make my way to a desk in the back. Everyone else in the room is head and shoulders taller than me and already talking in small groups. They look at me sideways. I move toward my desk and, like a shark swimming through a shoal of fish, I clear a path through the 6th-grade science class of Room 554, leaving me alone in a pocket with the teacher smiling at everyone but me.

            I drop my books on the floor when I try to put them in my desk and everyone stares at me as I pick them up, hundreds of fish eyes staring right at me, unblinking. They don’t make a sound but I can hear their laughter beneath their unsmiling faces.

****

            I pull out the picture, grimacing, and tuck it away toward the front of the book. Middle school was a difficult time. It was difficult for everyone, I supposed. I always thought that I’d just forgotten my deodorant that day. Before I met Brian, I didn’t know that I must have been experiencing a developmental delay in my growth and coordination.

I pull a picture out of the binding of the album. It must have fallen and gotten tucked away. It shows the perfect summer day, the grass a vivid shade of green.

****

I’m barefoot and I can feel the sponginess of the ground beneath the thick grass. We’re all wearing white and Mommy is holding onto me, trying to keep me from running off and spoiling my dress. She doesn’t have to hold on to me. The dress is the prettiest thing I’ve ever worn and if I stain it, Mommy will be upset. She’s been crying a lot recently and she’s gotten angry too. Natasha sits down a few yards ahead of us and starts pulling at the white ribbon around her collar. I call her back and she comes obediently.

            Mommy has not said a word to Daddy the whole day. She looks like she’s been crying. I don’t want to ask her about it because she spent two hours in the bathroom doing her makeup and if I make her cry again she’ll smudge it. So I don’t ask. Last time, she cried and then she yelled at me. Just a little; she was very upset. I don’t want to upset her--today is our family picture day!

            It’s hard to keep my eyes open because the sun is shining into them. But the photographer is nice and takes a thousand pictures. She gives me a sucker when she’s done.

            “We’re bound to have gotten one nice one,” she says as my parents give her a tip.

It takes forever to walk back to the car. I’m hungry and I wish my parents would hurry. They don’t, though. They just look at the ground when I tell them to hurry up.

            Daddy doesn’t open the car door for me like I’m a princess, bowing and helping me up with his hand. He just opens the door. I get in and buckle myself into my car seat. When I look up, Mommy is crying and there’s a streak of black makeup on her hand.

            “Mommy,” I say softly, waiting for her to get upset at whoever made her cry.

            “Might as well tell her now,” Daddy says. He’s holding the steering wheel with both hands and he doesn’t make vrooming noises when he starts driving.

            Daddy always makes vrooming noises when we pull away. Something is wrong. My stomach hurts and I feel like crying, but I try hard not to. Mommy needs me to listen. Natasha puts her head in my lap.

            “Baby,” Mommy says. “I have to move away. I can’t live with Daddy anymore.”

            For a second I think I might throw up. “Why?” I ask.

            “Daddy has done some very bad things.”

            Daddy’s hands hold tight to the steering wheel. I try not to cry but the tears hurt my throat. They buy me ice cream and I pet Natasha’s head, but it doesn’t help. I’m sick for days. A few days later, Mommy gives me the picture as she kisses me good-bye. It’s the most perfect picture of our family we’ve ever taken.

****

            Mom told me later that Dad cheated on her with a lot of other women. But I never knew that he probably cheated to relieve the stress of raising me while they both worked. I never knew...until I met Brian. It explained so much.

I hold the family picture as I turn the page. I pause over one on the second-to-last page of the album, touching it with my fingertips.

****

I’m standing outside, in front of a cluster of vines loaded with flowers. My hair is blowing in the warm breeze, covering my face. I’m laughing, a corner of a neon sign poking out from behind my head. I’m blissfully unaware of how much that coffee shop will change my life.

I step inside, hit with the warm, grassy smell of coffee and tea and essential oils. My friend heads to the restroom and I study a menu, scrawled in messy chalk calligraphy on a dusty board. I’m frowning over an iced or hot drink when he walks in and sits down at the counter, talking easily with the barista. He’s eye-catching, cute, with thick brown hair and a beard and a ratty, colorful sweater. His smile is a mile wide. My friend comes back and catches me staring and we laugh together, self-consciously smoothing our hair behind our ears.

It doesn’t take long for him to notice us. He orders another coffee and drums his fingertips on the counter while he waits. He winks over his shoulder at us.

As the barista hands him his coffee, her hand bumps the register. A little coffee sloshes out onto his hand. He jerks his hand away and slaps the counter, spitting profanity. My friend looks at me and giggles. “That must have hurt,” she says, swirling her own drink and taking another sip.

When I look back at him, he’s smiling, showing the barista all his teeth as he helps her mop up the puddle. He drops a dollar bill in the tip jar as he walks away.

“Hey,” he says, stopping by our table. “You look like new friends to me.”

He buys another coffee and sits down with us and smiles and laughs and chats. He’s charming, sweet, caring. He asks questions and listens genuinely to us, and he puts us right at our ease. When he leaves, he asks very politely for my number.

****

I pull the picture out of the album and smile at myself. If I’d known I’d meet him when I stepped inside, would I have looked different? Less carefree, more nervous? More relieved?

Meeting Brian has changed me. I hold the picture and look at it as the light fades and my wine gets warm on the table beside me. He helped me talk. He opened up my past. I’d always thought I got away with a pretty good life. But no one really understands how much childhood events affect adult behaviors. I’d thought I had a couple of sad things happen in my life, but I didn’t realize how much they’d really happened to me. How much they really hurt me.

I sigh and put the picture away, a faint shiver going through me.

Call me if you start feeling down, he said.

I run my fingers over the pictures. Their brilliance has faded a little. The feel of them beneath my fingertips fills me with...melancholy. I pick up the phone.

Before I met Brian, I never knew how much I never knew.

The Bridge

1200 words

The Bridge

I hold my breath as I approach the bridge at the edge of the world. He is moments ahead of me. The brilliant birds sing of a stranger beneath the trees. The shy jungle cats cry he has passed.

            I need not return home, the Grandmothers say, if I am not bold enough to take him, the last of his kind remaining on our world, before he crosses the bridge.

            I catch glimpses of his tawny body through the trees. The trigger on my blowpipe bulges beneath my fingertip; I raise it from my side as the trees thin around me. We near the bridge. The trees break, and he starts across the clearing, running fast and low.

            I break cover, pushing through a spiderweb covered in bright, jewel-toned drops, and shout.

            “Hey!”

            He freezes, one foot on the bridge.

            Glistening and slick, the bridge springs from the brilliant green side of the canyon, stretching into the hazy distance without suspension or pillar. Against the rainbow of sunlight glaring off it, his coloring is dim and tame. He eases his foot off the edge.

            I raise the blowpipe to my lips. The red sunlight flashes in tiny points off it as my hand trembles. My hand always trembles.

            His eyes meet mine across the space between us. His are brown, and they catch and reflect the light like the surface of a pool, all sharp twinkling points.

            I come from a race of mighty hunters. We have hunted his species all our lives. I learned it from my mother, and she learned it from her mother and she learned it from her mother, forever and forever into eternity. My finger tightens over the trigger button.

            He speaks.

            “You don’t know what you’re losing,” he says.

            My free hand flies to my translator, sitting just inside my ear. I tap it, my heart pounding—I turned it off an hour ago. The blowpipe drops to my side.

            “Please don’t shoot.”

            His voice is soft, smoother and deeper than anything I have heard before among the women in the city. It rumbles. It resonates in my bones.

            “Where did you learn to speak my language?” I demand. “The Grandmothers—”

            “The Grandmothers are wise,” he says. His body is rigid and upright and his sparkling brown eyes do not leave mine. If it were not for the voice, for the flat, square body—

            I cut myself off. He is still speaking.

            “They do not remember everything.”

            “They tell the ancient stories back a thousand years,” I say, shaking off the hypnotic pull of his voice. He is wrong.

            “They have forgotten what they once were.”

            Only once before have I hunted a creature—a tiger—with such eyes, large and innocent and frightened. I killed him right before he leaped at me. His words distracted me, flattering, fascinating words in an animal tongue through the translator I had forgotten to turn off. I swore I would make no similar mistake. Not with Man. Not with any other beast.

            I raise the blowpipe once again to my lips. My hand shakes so I can hardly sight down the barrel. The thought of killing a creature that speaks my language, that looks so unnervingly like me, sits like a hot pebble in my stomach.

            “You’ll never know, if you kill me,” he says, and I press the trigger.

            The little yellow feathers at the end of my dart never appear in his neck. His eyes meet mine, wide and smooth and no longer sparkling.

            The blowpipe slips from my fingers. I have missed. The blowpipe cracks as it hits the ground.

            “What were they before?” I ask. I can hardly force the words out.

            “We were all the same.”

            His curious voice, of all the jungle creatures the closest to my own, yet so different, holds my ear spellbound.

            “Before the Grandmothers,” he explains, “there were spacemen. They came and built cities and left ancestors. We were all the same, then, your people and mine.”

            I look down to my cracked blowpipe, lying half-hidden in the jungle grass at my feet. I pick it up.

            “Your kind always tells that story,” I say. I can hear the Grandmothers’ rebukes for the broken blowpipe and empty hands even now. Without a weapon, I realize how much larger he is than me, and I wonder how fast he can move.

            “What lies beyond this bridge?” he asks suddenly.

            “Chaos,” I answer, sliding my fingers into the chamber of the blowpipe and extracting my spare dart. I handle it with my fingertips, careful not to get the poison under my skin. The answer is the one the Grandmothers give the first time they take their daughters to see the bridge at the edge of the world.

            “Did they tell you that?”

            My answer hurts the back of my throat, so I do not make it.

            “Just a yes or no,” he says. His voice is thick and warm like fresh milk.

            “Yes,” I mutter.

            “Look,” he says. He turns and points; across the chasm, rising above the wet jungle haze, stretch five long, jagged fingers of glass.

            “They’re buildings,” he says. “Left by the spacemen who came before the Grandmothers. When we were all one.”

            I stare out over the chasm at the glinting buildings, my mouth open.

            I can’t believe I’m talking to him. Believing him. My prey. The Grandmothers would be furious. But why is it they would not tell us if such a thing were true?

            “How do you know?” I ask.

            “We, too, have our stories,” he says. He puts one foot back on the bridge. The skinny length of it begins to bounce up and down under his weight.

            I stare out across the chasm, across the mist, into the endless distance. “A city?” I ask.

            “Yes.”

            Impossible.

            “Why are you going?”

            “Because the Grandmothers have forgotten,” he says, “what it is like to be one.”

            I look again into his wide eyes, and a little hot longing awakens inside me to see what he will see and to hear the ancient stories still more ancient than my own.

            “And you will find out?” I ask.

            “Perhaps we can learn it again.” He shrugs. I wonder if he might be right, that we and Man were one in the years past.

            I look at the yellow dart I have concealed in my hand. The Grandmothers will be angry when I come home empty-handed. I will tell them that I dropped my blowpipe. I will tell them he escaped. They will be angry but it will pass.

            “Watch for it,” he says, turning back to the bridge. His back is broad and his neck exposed.

            I look at the dart and drop it to the ground. He steps out onto the bridge, bouncing up and down with the chasm winds. And then he disappears, and the bridge is still, and I have failed. Far in the distance, the fingers of glass buildings poke up into the sky.

            Without taking my eyes off them, I place my own foot onto the slick glass surface of the bridge and commit myself to the chasm winds.