I’m coming, she whirrs, again and again. Wait for me! I know which way to go!
“Once upon a time,” Auntie Ben says, seated beside Linnea’s bed, “there was a cage. But that cage is rusted all to hellfire and back now, and the men who built it are bones in the dust so dry not even a dark-flanked yearling would stop to take a sniff. Nobody remembers a damn thing about those men. Nobody remembers their chickens, their guns, or their stupid cage with the concrete floor. But they remember us, my little naked joey, sharp-toothed pride of my pouch. We were beautiful and strong. Our stripes left long shadows across their minds. There were plenty left to remember us, but who will be left to remember your kind?”
“Once upon a time,” Auntie Doris says, “—and oh, it was a long time ago, fresh fruit and green grass and the Rats and the Dogs not yet come—there were nests! Nests on the ground, can you imagine, beneath trees that dropped nuts so close you didn’t have to stretch your neck out far to take them. We laid our eggs where we pleased. But then the Men came—yesyes, and the Rats, and the Dogs, the terrible slavering Dogs—and the guns went bark bark bark all the live-long day. Our nests and our eggs and our fine fat selves, we dwindled down to nothing.
“But do they remember us now, sweet milk of my crop? Bless my gizzard and claws, they do! Those hungry men stopped being hungry, oh, ages ago, and their guns and their clubs rotted like rained-on feathers. Nobody remembers much at all about them and their growling bellies, but they remember our name, you’d better believe they do. There were plenty left to make our name round and fat, but mercy, who will be left to remember your kind?”
“Once upon a time,” Auntie Martha says—her voice is so soft you have to bend your eardrums low to pick up the words, a halting thing much gentler than her evening song—“we were a thousand. We were a million. We were many, and we blotted the sky with Ourselves. We flew where we pleased, and where we flew was pleasing. We followed the starmaps, the pull in our heads that said Go here! Go here!
“But the guns brought us down, by the thousands and the millions and the many. We lost the stars. We lost ourselves. But d’you think, little squab of my breast, that they could ever forget the sound of that many wings blotting out the sun? There were plenty of mouths and memories to pass on the beating of a million wings that was our name. As to who or what will be left to remember your own kind, dwindling with no wings to bear them away…”
Auntie Martha shakes her head.
“We were many too, once,” she repeats, barely a whisper. “I really am sorry.”
Linnea has a voice, too, but she doesn’t use it much. The inside of her head is a safe place, full of futures that will never happen so long as she keeps her words under lock and key. You open doors when you say things. There’s no telling what will come out of them, or where they may carry you off to in their jaws. Linnea likes it here; she has no desire to be stolen away. The days flash by unmarked—fur-yellow, feather-purple, rust-red—and change comes in slow, sneaky bursts, the space between looking away and turning back, moments of distraction. The earth grows a little more cracked. The ship teeters a little higher into the brassy sky. The wars Elsewhere, according to the dying radio in the kitchen, are running out of bodies.
“All things run out eventually, unless you outrun them first,” says Auntie Ben. Her shadow isn’t a woman’s and leaves no question as to her identity, falling snout-to-tail down the wooden work platform. “Your people were never canny enough to plan for the one nor fast enough for the other. Poor sods. Be a love and fetch me that pair of metal shears from out the kitchen, will you?”
Linnea does as she’s told, crossing the hardpan between farmhouse and building site at a gallop so the ground doesn’t burn her bare feet. Her own shadow is small and knobby-kneed and very much human.
Pretend you are the sea. Pretend you are a life-filled veil of green and gold and black and blue covering 70 percent of the land and most of its mysteries. Some day soon you will choke on refuse. A growing knot of bottles and bags and tires and zipties and rubber duckies and microbeads and bright plastic bric-a-brac will catch fast in your throat, suffocating all life from your deep places. You’ll bloat like a dead thing, an albatross chick’s belly packed tight and stretched grotesque with all the indigestible junk you’ve been fed. And when the last coral has withered—when the final whale has sung her question to an empty abyssal plain and there’s not even a hagfish left to mourn her passing—you will rise primeval, stinking of pig effluent and rotting fish, mercury and motor oil, an entire undead ecosystem marching on the cities of the coast.
Soon, but not now, and not for many ages yet. Today you are bursting with so much life the men who ride your waves in their great wooden ships cannot conceive of an end to it all. They match the seeming limitlessness of your largess with an equally insatiable hunger, seeking and searching and grasping. The world has never seen anything like it. There is no time to prepare; blink and they’re pulling ashore with axes and dogs and fire. Sink their boats and six hundred more will follow. Flood their encampments and they simply sail to the next island, rats and pigs ravaging in their wake.
You have protected this rugged little hunk of jungle and sand well. The animals here are special, coddled by your sheltering blue arms until they barely remember what fear is. The birds nest on the ground and lay their wings aside unused, for of what possible use are wings when there’s nothing to flee? Round and happy is Raphus cucullatus. Round and happy you would have them forever, your little flightless flock, but you cannot rage hard enough or squall fierce enough to stop what’s coming.
Hobnailed sailor’s heels in the white sand, clomping up the waterline. A crunch and a thud; the first pair of curious eyes dimmed.
The killing doesn’t stop for years. Axes ring and the fires burn and the rats and the pigs pick up where the clubs and machetes leave off, shattering eggs and snatching chicks even after the first settlers grow bored and Abel Tasman bobs away to wreak civilization on other untouched shores. They eat until there’s nothing left of the flock but white sticks in your surf.
They capture a few of the young birds alive and send them back across your waters. The last will be put on display as a public attraction, a curiosity kept in a dank, dark little chamber at the back of a shop. She will huddle into herself, feathers fluffed to ward off the chill of this gray place so far from her tropical homeland. The people who pay their pennies to see her will laugh at how round she looks, how plump and silly and vacant-eyed.
Nobody left to speak through the kitchen radio. No more words. What’s left of the nearby town dries up with the rain. They take what they want from the abandoned shops and load it into the pickup and there’s not a soul left squatting inside or out to squint twice at the theft.
Linnea snoops in the cobwebs and cupboards while they loot, because once upon a gas station that was how she survived and sometimes she misses the taste of greasy crisps and dime-store jerky. There are newspapers, but they’re all from a long ways back and fat as ticks with bad tidings. There are old weather almanacs, but past a certain printing they all run a woeful rut into the dirt: rising tides, rising dust, rising temperature lines the color of sunburn. There are photographs, but they’re not from a world Linnea knows. There are clocks, but nobody’s left to wind them.
There aren’t any crisps left, either. Just plastic crinkling in the creosote bushes, as mournful in its own way as Auntie Martha’s evening songs. Linnea licks the sweat salt off her lips as they drive home, the three aunties crammed into the cab and her alone in the bed with the wind and her thoughts and the wide-stretched sky.