Trudy rubbed her face again. Underneath the mock skin (Beautifully engineered! Only a well equipped lab that knew what to look for would be able to detect its extraterrestrial origin), I guessed her reshaped skull ached along its alien lines. She grimaced, a very human gesture of pain.
“Here, let me,” I said. In the kitchen, I filled a pan with warm water and found a washcloth. She watched me soak the cloth, then press out the excess moisture.
“I don’t think we should,” she said. Her hand rested on my forearm. “Thank you for the thought, though.”
Still, she didn’t resist when I placed the cloth against her cheek, let the warmth rest there for a moment, and then pushed my thumbs gently into the muscles. Her dark eyes locked on my own. When I went back to the bowl to reheat the cloth, she sighed and shut her eyes. I straddled her on the couch so I could massage both sides of her face equally. She moved her head against the pressure, so I could tell where she wanted it. Gradually, the apartment darkened, and the red sunset behind me went from vermillion to purple to sable. My thumbs kneaded her cheek bones, pushed into the ridge of her jawbone, circled under her ears—the skin caressed the covered bones, a whole tiny landscape of knobs and valleys and smooth plains, over and over.
She said, “Do you miss winter on Lasarént?”
My back ached with memory’s loss. The den filled and dark and close. The hormonal changes engendered in the moist soil and shared air, and the timeless eruption of tendrils in my back, burrowing through the mud, finding other tendrils, growing and intertwining until we joined, all of us, in one organism; one birthing, breathing, thinking organism that waited out the winter in warmth and communion and unity. The integration.
I couldn’t say anything, but swallowed the human sob in my throat while my thumbs orbited endlessly on her face.
Her hands went to my shirt, unbuttoning. In the darkness I saw her eyes glinting, staring again at me. I massaged the skull above the ears; her hair tickled my wrists. She held my ribs and pulled me closer, her breath hot on my chest, then she reached around and put her hands on my back.
“Here?” she said, her voice mellow against the music.
“Higher,” I said, and moved down so she could reach.
The Trosfrilla know our anatomy; they know us. One can’t go to war for generations without learning of the enemy, and she knew. She knew. Her fingers traveled up and down beside my back bone, digging until she found the buried tendril-pods, chemically suppressed, but still there, sensitive to stimulation, and she rubbed them gently.
When the music ended, I fell away, exhausted.
We breathed deeply in the now silent room, city lights glittering beyond the window, the traffic slowed to its night time murmur.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Does it hurt as bad?” I touched the side of her face.
She didn’t look at me. “Not as bad. And you?”
Of course there had been incomplete satisfaction in what she’d done, not like a full nesting, but she knew the tendril-pods were there. She’d touched them and reminded them they were alive.
“That felt good,” I said. “Thanks.”
Trudy rose from the couch, and I knew she was leaving.
She got to the door before I said, “Will I see you again?”
By the dim city light, she paused, her back to me—things remained that way for many heart beats—then she shrugged.
“Why?” she said.
I tried not to weep, my alien form overwhelming me with reflexive emotion, and I suddenly understood something human.
“Don’t mind me,” I said. “It’s all blather.”
CLASSROOM OF THE LIVING DEAD
They came for me on a Monday morning when I was too exhausted to hear the back door caving in. Only when their hands were on me did I realize that all was lost, but the dead didn’t consume me. They dragged me out of the house, shambled the three blocks to the school, holding me tight in their rotted hands, shuffling in that loose-limbed, broken way that they had, until they’d pulled me up the stairs, through the front doors with their glass knocked out, down the hall strewn with books and abandoned backpacks, until we came to my room.
Here, too, windows were broken, and the Venetian blinds hung askew. Morning sun slanted through the uneven slats. They pushed me toward my podium. I clung to the top, sick with fear. When would they kill me? Would I become like them?
They stumbled against the desks, former students, all of them: Daniel, who used to play his guitar at lunch; Lisa, with her pierced lip and blue-dyed hair; Landon, who read manga and drew big-breasted girls in the back of his notebooks, all my students. They bumped into the chairs, moaning low in their throats, until they were sitting, a terrible parody of the class they once had been.
What did they want, with their white-washed eyes and bruised faces? They looked at me, blank-faced, but ravenous, expectant, somehow. Hands gripped the sides of their desks. A breeze stirred a loose paper on the windowsill.
Finally, Joselyn, a girl who used to look like she ran a brush through her long, brunette hair a thousand strokes before she came to class, raised her hand, her hair a knotted mess, now, her blouse, torn and stained. She raised her hand and waited.
“Yes, Joselyn,” I squeaked.
She opened her mouth, and for a while nothing came except a strangled gasping, until she forced the word: “Braaaiiins.” Her hand dropped with a thud. “Braaaiiins.”
“That’s what you want?”
She nodded. They all nodded.
Was this what remained, after they died, after they reanimated? A desire to continue, to be a little bit of what they once were? Was it all habit? Would the athletes head to the gym after school to make layups? Would the marching band tramp across the field, their tuneless instruments dead in their grips?
Joselyn said, “Braaaiiins,” a third time.
I found a marker in the desk. What could be more surreal, but who was I after all? The world had ended. The apocalypse had arrived. Still, I was who I was. They were what they had become.
I turned to the board. “Today, I will show you how to diagram sentences.” I wrote on the white surface. I drew lines and made connections and spoke the arcane language of grammar. When I faced the class again, they were silent and attentive.
“Braaaiiins,” someone in the back groaned.
By the time the sun had traveled to the horizon, I’d filled the board and erased it a dozen times. It didn’t matter what I talked about. They didn’t answer questions. They didn’t move.
But they let me live.
Tomorrow I think I’ll teach literature. Some Dickenson, some Poe. Tomorrow I’ll teach to the dead and for the moment pretend that the world will go on.
Tomorrow they won’t have to drag me to school.
SAVANAH IS SIX
For as long as Poul could remember, he’d spent the summer at the lake where his brother drowned.
This year, as they climbed in the van, Leesa said cryptically, “Savannah is six.”
Poul held his hand on the ignition key but didn’t turn it. “I know.”
Each year since Savannah was born, it got harder to come out. The nightmares started earlier, grew more vivid, woke him with a scream choked down, a huge hurting lump he swallowed without voicing. Poul took longer to pack the van; he delayed the day he left, and when he finally started, he drove below the speed limit.