“Blessed St. Anthony,” she prayed, as she folded her quilt, “give me strength to defend my tomatoes.”
This seemed like a rather trivial thing to bother a saint with, once she said it aloud, so she added “And—err—defend me from temptation, amen.”
She pulled out her silverware drawer and dumped it on the kitchen table. With a ball of twine in one hand, she set to work.
By the time night fell, her best kitchen chair had been altered all out of recognition. She’d tied every fork and spoon to the back of it, flat with the bowl up or the tines out. Leaning back onto it would get you poked in a dozen places. There was one ladle aimed directly at the small of the back.
Grandma Harken was rather proud of that ladle.
She dragged the chair out on the porch and sat down on it, sitting bolt upright. She had a cup of tea in one hand—herbal, because she didn’t need to spend another night like the last one.
And she waited.
She dozed off once or twice, but as soon as she slumped backwards, the forks and the spoons jabbed her awake. The moon moved carefully in the sky overhead.
It was nearly midnight when she fell asleep—really asleep—and that lasted nearly a minute. But the ladle prodded her in the small of the back and forks were pressing into her shoulder blades and she came awake immediately.
The mockingbird landed atop the tomato cages and looked around. It was impossible to read anything in those small white eyes, but Grandma Harken thought it looked … furtive.
She kept her eyes lidded. Surely the porch was too dark for it to see her watching through the slits.
After a few moments of standing there, glowing like anything, the mockingbird dropped into the center of the bushes. Light splashed over the garden, briefly turning the squash and beans into a fantastic landscape of black and white … and then the light was gone.
In the dimness, she could see a figure standing up. The figure bent down, and came up with something in its hand.
Grandma Harken cocked the shotgun. The noise was like a crack of thunder across the desert.
The figure froze.
Grandma Harken looked down the barrel and said, “Don’t move. And don’t you drop my tomato.”
The mockingbird laughed. It was a woman’s laugh, short and rueful, but there was a bird’s hollowness behind it.
“If you shoot me, it won’t be very good for your tomatoes.”
“I ain’t getting much good out of them at the moment anyway,” said Grandma Harken. “Come out from between them, and don’t do anything sudden.”
“I won’t.”
She came out from between the plants, still holding the stolen tomato aloft.
Without taking her eyes off her captive, Grandma Harken leaned over and opened the back door. Light flooded out and lit up the face of the mockingbird-woman, where she stood at the foot of the steps.
She was human-shaped, short and broad in the hips, but not human-colored. She had a dark grey back and the white belly of a mockingbird. Her face was grey and black from the lips up, her chin and throat white.
She was naked, but she had feathers instead of hair. Her eyes were starkly orange.
Grandma Harken’s hand didn’t waver on the shotgun, but her mind was off and running like a jackrabbit.
She was never born a shapechanger, not looking like that. Whatever she’s done or had done to her, it came from the outside in.
Huh.
Can’t imagine why anyone would try to turn herself into a mockingbird, but there’s strange people in the world and no accounting for taste.
At least she ain’t a kachina, or anything that looks like one. She’d been a trifle worried about that. Grandma Harken’s relationship with the people up on the three mesas was distant but cordial and she wanted to keep it that way.
People get awfully tetchy when you point a shotgun at their spirits.
Well, you couldn’t blame them. If blessed Saint Anthony came walking through the desert, Grandma Harken would’ve been pretty miffed if somebody shot him full of rock salt.
The shapechanger came up on the porch. She moved slowly, but slowly like a woman who’s got a gun pointed at her, not like someone who isn’t fitting inside their skin.
“Go on inside,” said Grandma Harken. “I’m right behind you.”
She got up. The mockingbird-woman glanced at the chair, wired with silverware, and laughed. “So that’s how you stayed awake,” she said. “Suppose a magic sleep can’t compared to a bunch of forks in the back.”
Magic sleep. It wasn’t just me getting old. That was a magic sleep.
Grandma did not punch the air and whoop, because that would have been undignified.
Instead she said, “I figured it wasn’t natural,” and sniffed.
The mockingbird-woman went inside the house. Grandma shut the door and gestured to a chair with the shotgun. “Have a seat.”
“You planning on shooting me?” asked her captive.
“Hand over that tomato and I won’t shoot anybody.”
The mockingbird woman handed over the tomato. Her hands were hard and charcoal-colored, the nails long and diamond shaped. They creased the red skin of the tomato just slightly, but didn’t break the surface.
“Why’re you stealing them?” she asked.
“Ain’t for me,” said the mockingbird-woman.
Grandma’s eyes flicked to the woman’s strange orange ones. “Ah.”
“Don’t ask me about it,” said the woman. “There’s not much point.” She opened her mouth, and Grandma saw that her tongue was black, and there was a thick silver ring through it.
“Surprised you can talk at all,” she said.
The mockingbird-woman shrugged. “You learn to work around it.”
Grandma nodded. “So you haven’t eaten any of these tomatoes?”
“Not a one. Give you my word.”
And that’s another strike against her being born a mockingbird. No member of the crow clan’d hand out their word so lightly.
She hefted the tomato. She’d made bread earlier in the day, and a little dab of mayonnaise, for the tomato ripening on the counter. Best to eat it up quick. Neither one would last long in the hot desert air.
“Sit a spell,” she said, “and we’ll fix that.”
Grandma Harken sat at her dinner table with the mockingbird-woman and they ate tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise and a pinch of salt.
It was every bit as good as Grandma Harken had been hoping. The tomato was sweet and acid and firm. It tasted like a morning in summer before the sun burned everything down to the bone.
That tense place in her chest loosened up a little. The world was hard and fierce, but it also contained tomato sandwiches, and if that didn’t make it a world worth living in, your standards were unreasonably high.
“So you ain’t wearing a mockingbird skin,” said Grandma Harken, watching her guest eat up the last crumbs. “You’re not taking one off and putting it back on again.”
“Nope,” said the woman. She licked one of her charcoal fingers and pressed it down on the crumbs, then licked them off again.
“And you were never born that way, either.”
“Born same as you,” said the woman.
Grandma Harken smiled sourly. “I very much doubt that,” she said. “But born human, I guess?”
“You guess right.”
“You under some kind of spell, then?”
The mockingbird-woman tapped a fingernail against the silver cuff on her tongue and said nothing.
“Ah,” said Grandma. “Well, then. You got a name you can tell me?”
“Marguerite.”
“And I’m Grandma Harken. And we’re all introduced now. You like being a mockingbird?”