“Yeow,” she said.
I passed out Hamlet and assigned Wendy and Rick to read the parts of Hamlet and Horatio.
“‘The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,’” Wendy read.
“Where are we?” Rick said. I pointed out the place to him. “Oh. ‘It is a nipping and an eager air.’”
“‘What hour now?’” Wendy read.
“‘I think it lacks of twelve.’”
Wendy turned her paper over and looked at the back. “That’s it?” she said. “That’s all there is to Hamlet? I thought his uncle killed his father and then the ghost told him his mother was in on it and he said ‘To be or not to be’ and Ophelia killed herself and stuff.” She turned the paper back over. “This can’t be the whole play.”
“It better not be the whole play,” Delilah said. She came in, carrying her picket sign. “There’d better not be any ghosts in it. Or cockles.”
“Did you need some Solarcaine, Delilah?” I asked her.
“I need a Magic Marker,” she said with dignity.
I got her one out of the desk. She left, walking a little stiffly, as if it hurt to move.
“You can’t just take parts of the play out because somebody doesn’t like them,” Wendy said. “If you do, the play doesn’t make any sense. I bet if Shakespeare were here, he wouldn’t let you just take things out—”
“Assuming Shakespeare wrote it,” Rick said. “If you take every other letter in line two except the first three and the last six, they spell ‘pig,’ which is obviously a code word for Bacon.”
“Snow day!” Ms. Harrows said over the intercom. Everybody raced to the windows. “We will have early dismissal today at 9:30.”
I looked at the clock. It was 9:28.
“The Over-Protective Parents Organization has filed the following protest: ‘It is now snowing, and as the forecast predicts more snow, and as snow can result in slippery streets, poor visibility, bus accidents, frostbite, and avalanches, we demand that school be closed today and tomorrow so as not to endanger our children.’ Buses will leave at 9:35. Have a nice spring break!”
“The snow isn’t even sticking on the ground,” Wendy said. “Now we’ll never get to do Shakespeare.”
Delilah was out in the hall, on her knees next to her picket sign, crossing out the word “man” in “Spokesman.”
“The Feminists for a Fair Language are here,” she said disgustedly. “They’ve got a court order.” She wrote “person” above the crossed-out “man.” “A court order! Can you believe that? I mean, what’s happening to our right to freedom of speech?”
“You misspelled ‘person,’” I said.
THE MIGRATORY PATTERN OF DANCERS
Katherine Sparrow
The inexorable pull to move south grows. The sun hums to me all day long that it’s time to go, go, go. The night sky is even more persistent—every constellation in the big Montana sky makes arrows pointing south. My appetite increases and I develop a layer of fat on my belly. My senses grow more intricate—smells carry layers of meaning, gnats and mosquitoes become visible everywhere I look, and the normal sounds of human civilization hurt my ears with all their chaos.
And now my eyes have changed. The cornea and pupil widen so that the white is barely visible. A mercy that the genetic modifications left me normal eyes for summer and winter, but when it changes, it is unsettling for everyone. My vision increases three-fold. It is the last sign that it is time.
“Your eyes look funny,” Marion says. My wife drops her fork onto her plate and starts to cry.
This is another sign, as real and inevitable as all the others.
“Josiah, don’t go this time. Stay here. Stay safe. We’ll manage, somehow.” She cries harder. Marion is beautiful when she cries. She breaks my heart every time. “Why won’t they ever leave you alone?”
We’ve been avoiding this for the last month as though time was not passing—as though summer was not heading toward fall. I don’t know what to say to her. I never know what to say.
“I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning.” I reach out for her hand, but she pulls away from me. She doesn’t want to touch me, to be any more vulnerable than I have already made her. Later there will be an intensity burning in her as she takes me into our room and undresses me, touches every part of my body as though there will be a test later and she must memorize it all. This too is another one of the signs.
Marion drives our old griesel out to a lonely stretch of road in Glacier National Park. She doesn’t say goodbye to me, but holds me tight and then lets me go. Despite her words, she and I both know what I will do, if I have to. There are three other men waiting on the road.
“Good summer?” Scotty asks.
“Yep,” I say. “Hot enough for you?”
“Yep.”
There’s Keith who’s twenty-eight, the youngest and darkest skinned of us—he’s mixed; Scotty, gay, thirty-seven, and a beast of a rider; and Hector, forty-four, Mexican but from the US. He doesn’t speak Spanish but his wife and kids do. We’re a strange migrating flock, not much in common, nothing like the huge numbers of wild birds who used to travel across the US and wore a monotony of feathers on their bodies. But once you see us dance, then you know we belong together.
“How you been, Josiah?” Hector asks. I feel his eyes looking me over, wondering about me now that I’m the oldest: now that Siv’s dead.
“Ready to ride.” Christ, I’m only fifty-six.
“Any one seen the new guy yet?” Keith asks.
Silence. It had been a good seven years without any casualties. Fourteen migrations without any big accidents: a stretch so long I think we all forgot what could happen. No one noticed Siv getting older. He didn’t show any weakness, not up until the very end. And now we had a new guy coming on.
Our Sponsor arrives in a long black four door car spewing enough exhaust to make my eyes water. He steps out wearing sunglasses and skin stretched so tight over his face that he looks like he might pop. All the immortals look like that. Even though they have enough money to buy life, they have that look to them like it’s been a long time since they’ve lived at all. We smile at him, each of us thinking, I reckon, about the last time we saw him.
He was yelling and calling us murderers as we all stood around the broken body of Siv. He threatened us with life in prison, even though we all knew he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Now he’s showing off his white as paint teeth and looking at us like we are racing horses: profitable flesh. He frowns as he looks at me. Other doors on his car open and men that look like him, but with cheaper clothing, get out. You can’t get them to talk to you, I’ve tried.
The new rider comes out of the car and blinks like he’s just waking up. It takes a while to get used to the eyes. He’s too skinny—someone should have told him to fatten up—but otherwise he looks tough enough. He has thick black hair, olive skin, and a five o’clock shadow even though it’s only noon. He looks us over. He smiles at Keith, who must be the leader, I can see him thinking, because he’s the youngest and strongest. Keith smiles back enigmatically.
“This is Theo Anders, boys, and he’s going to make me proud!” The Sponsor tries to act like one of the good old boys, but there’s a billion dollars and ownership issues between us.
A trailer pulls up with our bicycles, and Scotty runs over to them. He’s our resident gearhound. Our Sponsor chats him up about all the new components on his bike.
“No way! Awesome!” he says.