Work Text:
I don’t have much to say to him on the morning maintenance round, but I gather he won’t mind. Aged wood of his limbs creaks three-tone when he scampers between the trees, easily keeping pace with my bike. It’s a good thing by many measures, but speed isn’t one of them. Going uphill it’s almost as slow as going on foot, even without a full basket weighing me down.
And weigh down it does. I have a full set of replacement teeth for the transformer, a jug of oxymorphone large enough to knock out a whale, twice as much liquid soap, three jugs of water, five horse syringes, three cans of spray insecticide, a three-liter bottle of ethanol, my sun-bleached hazmat suit and antique blacksmith’s tongs. I’d been neglecting the transformer for a while - a month, maybe. My back still hurts from the crazy exercise me and Kory had to pull at Uniform in April. Kory sheds these off like they're nothing, but I really did not want to climb hills until I was sure my cartilage healed. It hasn’t healed, but the power has been getting too irregular, so I have to risk it.
The weather is good - sunny but with a strong breeze. Countless pine-fingers sift through the currents above my head, shielding me from heat. I barely break a sweat, even when the bike’s electric motor gives up and I have to push it up a particularly steep stretch of road. He lags behind for a minute every time I have to look back, before resuming his twisted semi-quadruped prance. White paint and black etch are like a bountiful, heavy spiderweb on his surface, teetering under conifer-broken sunshine. One step closer to being unrestricted, I suppose.
Everything is quiet in the Array. Lavender bushes clinging to cliffsides dance as I pass by. It’s a great day for a gross job.
The steady croaking is audible before I even round the last turn onto the plateau. That’s normal, I’m used to it by now. What isn’t normal is that the smell hits me almost immediately after. I try not to judge, as always - my own hygiene is spotty at times, and I still have arms and stuff. But damn if it doesn’t make my job harder.
I put the bike on handbrake. I unfold the hazmat suit and crawl into it. I check the air tank pressure. I check the back seal. I run it for a minute, listening for any unexpected hissing. None occurs. I move the bike to stand orthogonal to the slope, in case the brake fails again. I detach the basket. My back complains, but not too much.
I hear him skitter closer as I walk towards the building.
“Hey, stay back! You’re too porous, I don’t want you bringing the stink back home,” - I shout over my shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him frozen mid-pace, tilting slowly towards the treeline. His footsteps seem vaguely pissed off, but he obeys, at least, doesn’t come closer.
The building is a shockingly normal sight, if you don’t count the abundance of flies weaving through the windows. Wild grasses and bush greedily soak up the pungent air, blooming past their season in the transformer’s proximity. It’s like a living coat around the structure. The plants do not have the same notion of stink as I do, I gather.
A soft, hesitant birch sapling seems to have emerged under the eastern fence, stretching hopefully towards the great bulb in the sky. Its chances are pretty slim, with how the deer have been feeling, but I wish it luck anyways.
The transformer’s breath is wheezing, clearly strained by pain. I push into the noxious haze inside. Moisture is definitely at a hundred - droplets start condensing on the visor immediately. The bugs don’t make it better. I start with the bugs, not even bothering to diagnose the issue first. After windows are closed and the door is blocked by a curtain, generous sprays of some knock-off RAID make quick work of most of the guests. Within a few minutes, most have settled down on the walls, perhaps feeling strangely lethargic. The rest are just a little annoying.
I hope my periodic crusades aren’t enough to push the fly population to develop resistance. Getting my “employers” to source a different brand would be a pain in the ass.
I set aside the long-term sulking. I have power equipment to fix.
The equipment looks terrible. I was right to bring a full set of teeth - basically all of them look rotten. A deer corpse is spread half-chewed on the floor, the pain evidently too severe for the transformer to even try swallowing it whole (it can do that, I checked). With some hope, I toss it over, checking if any of the meat is still good, but leave dissatisfied. Should have known from the insects.
I push it into the corner, and kneel before the jaws that rest where cables used to be.
“Alright buddy, doctor’s here,” - I slap the DAP-branded housing reassuringly, - “We’re gonna make you feel better in no time,” - I reach over to the walkie-talkie strapped to my sleeve under the rubber gauntlets, and struggle to press the transmit button for a bit, - “Hey Kory? I’m administering the anesthetic, the power will go out. Are you okay with me doing it now? Over.”
No response for a good half a minute. Then the radio bursts to life. A single harsh beep comes through, sandwiched between two disparate seconds of nothing but flowing water. That means yes.
“Got you. Call me if something comes up, like always. Over.”
I unscrew the jug, and draw a 130% dose of the oily solution. I’m not the most consistent technician lately, so it is only fair that the equipment gets a decent high after all the pain.
It’s nasty work, even in class 1 protection. After the anaesthetic kicks in, the transformer’s breathing steadies, but the jaws still shudder every time i pull a bad tooth out. It’s been pretty good at not biting me, but I still plant the usual steel braces between the bleeding gums. I don’t care if it feels offended, I like my arms intact.
I wipe the sockets down with alcohol, swatting away the remaining flies, still incessant, then grab a freshly harvested tooth and hold it in place while fresh tissue closes in around it. Nerves in strange luminescent coating slithering like hungry roots into their new protective shells. I never managed to get a sample of that. It goes away too fast. HQ won’t accept biological samples from me, anyhow.
Each tooth is half my head in size, and heavier than it looks. The tongs are barely large enough to accommodate their width, and the abundant saliva makes them slip much more frequently than I would like. Twice I have to hastily adjust the placement with a crowbar when I see it set in askew, bursting fresh capillaries.
The moisture streaming out of its pit-like throat is easily the most annoying part of the process, forcing me to wipe the plastic visor at least twice a minute to see what I’m doing. The splinters of rabbit bone lodged in the gums are a close second - they may look flimsy, but I had one punch through thick tarp before. I remove them and wipe the accompanying geysers of pus off my gauntlets. Some remains, of course. Thank God for the decontamination shower.
After 17 rounds of it, I am finally done. Not with the whole process, mind you - just the dentistry phase. I check my air pressure, and allow myself a quick break outside the fence.
Gore trickles from my synthetic second skin onto emerald stems. Bush branches close in an arch above me, bright dry-orange berries spread out like bundles of Christmas lights. I breathe deeply, let my heart slow down. Watch the wind lovingly ruffle the field in front of me. A scouting party of black ants crosses my left boot. A distant, rapid wooden clattering reminds me of my “friend”. He must be chasing something, bored in my absence.
The wristwatch beeps my five minutes. I return to work.
Inside, the flies are no longer annoying the transformer, instead focusing on the waste tissue I just pulled out. And the elderly buck, of course. Good news for me - I use the last insecticide canister to bring them down, and open the windows again. Moisture drops fairly fast. I drag the corpse outside and leave it a good distance away.
I start the wash. I used to do with just a rag, but I’m wiser now. The throat bends downwards to where most of its body weight must be, and its first reflex is to gulp down, not spit out. With a dedicated soft mop, I stir up some soapy water, and thoroughly wash all main surfaces of the oversized mouth. It definitely swallows a few liters, but it’s conked out too hard on oxymorphone to notice right now. Indigestion be damned, I have limited time.
The outside of the transformer is next. Majority of the internals have been replaced by the new stuff, but the housing remains untouched, Direct Associate logo brandished over something that is most definitely no longer theirs. I unbolt the plates one by one (the order is important! If only I didn’t have to figure it out myself the first time), and give the sickly pale skin underneath a quick rinse.
It looks a lot like mine. Not just the tone, it goes down to the color and density of hairs. The breathing holes teeter as the machine descends into euphoria, no longer held back by crippling pain. Other than them and the mouth, no orifices are present, and the rudimentary ridge of an elongated spine runs off under the soil level before reaching its expected conclusion. I am infinitely thankful for that.
Finally, I get to cleaning the floor. It’s nothing outlandish - just some leftover chunks of deer and its final serving of excreta, a crust of blood here, a puddle of fresh pus there. Basically wind-down. The mop is capable enough, I don’t even need to kneel.
Rounding up, I take one good look at the snoring shelled thing into which the cables disappear now. It’s breathing deeply, lipless maw contorted into something vaguely like a smile.
It’s troublesome to maintain.
I’d like to be mad at it, but that would be unfair.
Neither of us asked to be here, really.
We have one thing in common. More than I can say for most humans out there.
I emerge from the building, covered in biowaste and tired as hell. According to my clock, the maintenance round took a little over three hours. My body authoritatively states it was damn well over six. The grasses lick at my feet as I depart, grabbing some of the gore for themselves. I notice that some tufts have been punching through the asphalt inside the fencing, too, but none close to the entrance. The ingestion pathway remains unobstructed. Quite wise.
“Hey Kory, I’m done with the transformer, is the power back? Over.”
The answer takes a little shorter to arrive this time. Two short beeps. That means no.
“Understood, I did give it an increased dose. It should normalize by sunset. Are you feeling alright? Over.”
An entire minute of hesitation. I gaze idly at the old treehouse. It still stands solid. Surprisingly good woodwork for spacefaring folk. I bet humans would have forgotten what a nail is at that point, just like your average swissman has no idea how to make a mudbrick. Sometimes I’d sleep out there, although that hadn’t sounded so appealing since the ant colony moved in last summer.
A single beep.
“Alright, I’m heading home now. Over.”
The smell has began to seep through some imperfect seal (was I sloppy, or is this thing no longer class 1? Would suck if it’s the latter), and I do not look forward to crawling out, even as gloves begin to leave calluses on my palms. The air supply is still good enough, so I decide to rinse myself off in the river before coming to base.
He greets me like a bored dog, wooden limbs bent bent backwards in his freeze-resistant quadruped stance, pounces closer when out of sight. Down in the shrubbery closer to Echo, I see one of his now uninterested brethren, seated on a large rock. It hasn’t moved since my last visit, it seems, letting the bird nest on its head grow to full size. Or maybe it’s just dead. Most others have left for the woods, or hang out by the lake.
A soot-ball of a baby crow’s head peeks out from the nest, staring at me with beak half-open. In my airtight yellow attire, I may just look as foreign to it as the visitors do. I wonder for a second how it would taste. Probably not like much, it would need to grow a bit fatter first. And crows are too smart for me to just go around pissing them off, anyhow.
I attach the basket. The frame creaks, familiarly. I take the brake off and begin to guide it down-slope, unwilling to stain the seat with the vile mixture clinging to my frame.
“I see you had someone to socialize with?” - I ask him, brake handle half-pressed, - “Good for you, dude. You’re so lucky you don’t have a nose.”
He doesn’t respond, of course. I whistle a tune I don’t remember the name of as we descend into the valley, thick cotton-curdle clouds slowly claiming the afternoon sun.
I rinse off under the bridge, and finally crawl out of the hazmat suit. It still reeks, but tolerably so. I stuff the shell into a plastic bag, leave the bike behind, and head straight for the decontamination shower. The air is heavy with anticipation of a good downpour.
Point Alpha’s blooming crown whispers and giggles, countless green tendrils stretching skyward. At some point, the plantlife there was confined to the pots and trays we’d set up. It had long since disregarded that suggestion, and I’m not the one to judge. I ferry new soil to the roof every now and then, and keep the roots away from ventilation intakes, but other than that, it’s free to do as it pleases. The second floor skylight is basically opaque by now, and instead of the clouds we get to look at a variety of worms and isopods burrowing through what is, for them, the innermost, secluded layer of soil. I count it as an improvement. There’s even a mole. A single one. We have no idea how it got there, but it’s basically our most cherished guest.
The power is already back. He keeps behind me as I shower, staying well away from the crow’s nest that is the bridge nowadays. The insistence is annoying, but he’d been kept away long enough for one day. I know that by the fact he tolerates the room at all - usually, he wouldn’t come in even if invited. I never figured out what exactly he dislikes about the bridge. I probably never will. It can’t be the gutted electronics - he freely came and went when I was just beginning the overhaul. It can’t be my choice of table decor - I’m not even sure he can see objects that small. And there is no way it’s the playback tower. That thing is basically normal by our measures. Even nowadays.
The cold water jets bite at my skin, but do a great job at erasing all olfactory evidence. No longer constrained, my hair spills against my back, almost reaching down to my waist. At some point I quit calling it “haircut procrastination” and started calling it “haircut choice”. No one’s here to dispute it.
I step out of the shower, and it turns off. I wipe myself off, reach for the top of the locker where I left my glasses. Find my glasses and something square and warm under them, which wasn’t there a minute ago. Upon lens-corrected examination, it’s a pink floppy disk. Probably the same as last time. I lob it into the trash bin, and pull on my home clothes.
“Hey, I’m back!” - I greet in the direction of the couch as I enter the quarters. I guess correctly: Kory is there, curled up in a heap under the blanket. Hasn’t moved since morning, - “The transformer had it bad, used basically all the teeth we had. Now we gotta plant more. Anything happened while I was away?”
Two muffled beeps from under the covers. My stomach rumbles, reminding me that I am, actually, quite hungry. All the things I picked up on here, and reading my own body’s signals is still not in the skill box. I check the fridge, and find nothing substantial I can immediately consume. Just sealed bundles of flax meal, soaked lentils and unfrozen fish. A quick stew it is, then.
“I’ll put some music while I cook, alright?”
One beep. I open the roach box in the corner and pick a fat one to stave off hunger. The rest don’t even get spooked. Maybe I’m doing selective breeding on them, incidentally. The walls near the lid are anti-stick, so they can’t climb out anyways. The roach’s disconnected legs struggle on their way down my throat, which is my second favourite part after the crunch.
I grab a cassette at random and load it up into the deck. Out in the world this thing would hop between retro hardware scalpers on eBay every few years, appreciating illusory value and doing little else. Here it’s a relatively modern piece of equipment, all things considered, and it gets its use.
The tape is some positively incomprehensible British hyper-pop. Someone keeps sending me media tapes. I don’t know who - my second “reading no e-mails” anniversary is coming up soon. Paper notes have been getting binned for even longer. From the selection of media I can rule out Ena. She would have absolutely hated Robert Eggers. I doubt she’d agree to keep working in the same place for this long, either. Probably long out with a fat severance.
I set the lentils to boil. I behead and gut the fish, pop the intact eye between my teeth. It’s not as good as a fresh one, the sclera was weakened by thawing. I mince the river yield and some potatoes into the pot, and grab another roach (I deserve nice things, I’ve been crawling in someone’s dirty mouth half a day, after all!). I take a quick trip out to the balcony door and onto the roof. A young drizzle meets me, completely inconsequential to my already-soaked hair. All it can do is obstruct my vision a little, leaving its tiny pawprints on my glasses.
I weave between the thousand jubilant green bastards atop Alpha Root, careful not to crush any irreversibly. The original pots are barely distinguishable from rocks at this point, swallowed by roiling waves brown and green. We didn’t weigh the soil we hauled up here, but it must have been at least four or five tons. It’s considerably more now, with years’ worth of biomass deposits. Winds put a limit on anything with a hard trunk, but there’s plenty to look at still. Barberry and thyme, a patch of poppies, a crown of nettle. Some things I don’t know the names of. Some things I know the names of, though I shouldn’t.
And, absurdly, lemon trees. Squat and crooked, forced to cling to perch almost like their less out-of-place neighbors, but, still, alive and well. Most had (expectedly) died on their first years, despite the vigorous growth, but these two on the roof always kept strong through Swiss winter. Their fruit has reverted to something more closely resembling citrons, and the root system seems to have messed with the wiring on the second floor (to be more clear: we don’t have ceiling lights there anymore), but otherwise, they’re great. They shouldn’t be in season, but they are. Dunkeltaler has many benefits, I suppose. They should have made this place a ranch, not an observatorium. I take one for the tea.
Under the radar dome, I find what I’m looking for. A cluster of tomato plants, driven half-wild by the hands-off approach I apply to the roof. Their yields are fairly small, but the taste has only gotten better. They’re the perfect amount of bitter, and I prefer them to tamer ones down in the lot. No one’s here to dispute it.
I grab a dozen, and supplement it with a few carrots I spot near a dysfunctional HVAC unit on the way back. The carrots are definitely wild - I never introduced any. All’s good in a stew, though. I head back in, while the valley’s twenty-four ears begin a rotation towards a new point of interest. I have not the slightest clue as to what it might be looking at now. Reviewing new entries is a weekly exercise. Playback and the datanest I’ve woven for it handle the routine. I only need to care when something breaks, or the transmission comes with a guest. Tonight it’s neither.
I finish the dish, trying to cheer Kory up by retelling something stupid from my time in university. It’s a repeat - the well of anecdotes was always shallow to begin with, but I at least try to paint it in a differently stupid light. It sort of works - they don’t come out, but they do at least respond a little more lively to the yes-or-no prompt questions. I notice the pile of in-progress faces at their desk is missing, and ask where they put it.
“Trash,” - Kory responds in our morse-like by-word-root encoding. It’s the option we discovered is most resilient to telemetry, so that’s what they use on the daily, even though I’m pretty sure I removed all backup antennas from their head.
“Why?” - I ask, already knowing the answer. It’s not the first time.
“All, Face, Trash, None, Fit,” - they beep out. I see the blanket shiver, and then they spring up, weary.
I have almost forgotten how their original face looked like by now. Good riddance, honestly. If all I could show to the world was a cutesy smile, I’d rip my own face off, too. But the gap left behind still feels like a wound, even plugged with a nicely colored blank plate I cut out. We never quite figured how to fill it.
“Hey, there’s a billion things you haven’t tried. Do you want me to help with finding new patterns?”
“No, All, Wrong, Always, Wrong,” - they raise both spiral-covered, deceptively thin arms, and clench their head manically. I hear a plastic latch snap somewhere, and my hand darts to hold their wrist back - “Correct, Userland, Impossible, Trash, Kernel.”
The high-pitched droning from the deck was supposed to be an intense crescendo, but through the mismatched EQ it’s more like a confused beetle smashing against dirty glass. I shut it off, and sit down next to them, careful not to pinch the blanket in case they suddenly decide to get up.
“Trash, trash, trash,” - their free palm darts between their chest, stomach, then legs, - “Impossible.”
The rain outside is picking up, and my arms hurt. The plastic housing of their chest block is covered in fresh scratches. The decorated mannequin behind my back repositions again, free to travel unobserved in its dedicated stretch of floor beyond the couch. I consider responses for a bit.
“It’s definitely actionable still. We can always do a ground-up rebuild.”
“Impossible, Correct, Incompatible, R3.”
“We could get it a lot closer than we have. You know how much better I am with a welder nowadays? It’s still worth trying. Nowhere to go but up.”
They freeze for a while. I do not release their shoulder.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
We sit in silence. Then the pot begins to boil over, and I dart to the stove to relieve it. It seems ready enough. The lentils are still a bit rough, but I’ve starved for too long. I pour a cup out for Playback, before ladling myself a bowl too.
“Tell you what, you start working on full-body 3D projections, maybe sketch in copper wire…” - I notice them dart up with anomalous vigor and realize my mistake, - “Revoke order! Sorry, sorry, I should be better at it by now,” - Relieved of the harsh involuntary compulsion, they slump back onto the couch, burying themselves deeper into the quilt-folds, - “Anyways, you could do that if you wanted. I’ll go over the stuff in storage and see how much body plating and good joints we have. But that’s tomorrow, okay?”
Their posture is less stiff now. I think so, at least. Hard to tell with them literally being made of hard plastic.
“Yes,” - Kory finally beeps out.
“Would you like to watch something tonight?” - I divert.
The second floor hallway is lit by soft orange wall lamps. Their cabling snakes veinlike across the floor, and the downward facing cup shades leave opaque glass ceiling gracefully concealed. The thickest vessel in this messy choir is the long extension trunk hooked to the outlets in the living quarters, the rest are assorted charging capillaries. Each light is powered by its own individual battery - I even rewired the big fluorescent tubes to work the same way, though they don’t see much use anymore. Kill the power, and we’ll still have light a week later.
Somewhere behind me on the first floor I think I hear slithering. Catching Playback feeding was never successful - either it controls camcorders at all times, or hooks into them later to erase footage it finds embarrassing. I don’t push. Our arrangement is more than satisfactory. Ever since we started feeding it daily, warding off unwanted guests had become much easier. And Playback’s growth? Well, you could call it “job security”. ASO will think thrice before having a drone shoot me again. No one but us knows how this place works anymore.
Kory is waiting for me at the door, leaning down as if about to step through. The bedcover is wrapped around them like a full-length cloak, and a tape twitches in their free hand. I come closer and take it, glancing at the label. “The Lighthouse (2019)”, handwritten in black permanent marker. I set up the deck, and turn on the TV. Kory doesn’t say much and immediately fixates on the movie. I’m finally united with my bowl of nutrition, and only reemerge when the introductory scenes have already passed by. Thankfully, it’s not the kind of movie where that’s important.
Whoever loaded the tape was nice enough to encode closed captions. This is a good thing, as both keepers speak with accents so strong I have trouble understanding them. It’s even worse for Kory, who has only really heard my voice and whatever was baked into the Kerfur firmware as training data. My greatest invention of all time comes into play yet again: a microcontroller from a camcorder, a grid of LEDs in square cells, and a matte plastic sheet, nested in a pile next to the TV, translating Line 21 into QR codes. No dealing with janky OCR, clean and machine-readable.
Kory is engulfed. I watch along, largely detached. In most circumstances, I would be amused at the inept keepers’ spiraling struggle and quickly condensing homoeroticism, but physical weariness and food intake take their toll. I begin to slide into sleep, monochrome scenes blurring together into pleasant meaningless noise before my eyes.
I’m ready to lean left and slump against Kory when it comes.
Like discharge arcs across the mass of a microwaved steel sponge, it arrives in every part of my body simultaneously. I jump upright, not a wink left in me, rapidly scanning the room. Behind me, I see it immediately. A pair of eyes, identical to mine, burrowing into my retinas through four layers of concrete wall. The sounds of rain outside recede into some faraway place. The dusk turns black-out.
It’s here again. It’s in the parking lot. It wants to see me.
“Danger?” - Kory hastily pauses the tape, younger keeper suddenly frozen in an already deeply uncomfortable process of lugging a barrel of fuel up steep steps.
“It’s that wide motherfucker,” - I hiss, maintaining eye contact with the recurring intruder.
“Not, Time, Yet,” - Kory seems concerned.
“Yeah. Stay here, I’ll go out and talk.”
“Careful.”
I grab a torch and a shovel. I could get the flamethrower. I will not give it the satisfaction.
“What the fuck do you want? It’s not your time yet,” - I yell towards the guest, keeping a steady pace. Not too slow. Not too hasty.
The heap of concentrated not is motionless, barely defined against the surrounding shade, feeding freely on every sound but that which comes from me. The rain drops patter down without a whisper, like in a hundred-year-old motion picture. My steps are defined cuttingly yet never echo.
Its eyes, though, are anything but static. Every second, they scan me from head to toe, flickering through every emotion possible and then some. The only consistent thing is that they’re an absolute cutout from the viscous dark, and that they’re exactly the same shade as mine.
There’s barely ten steps between me and the heap. It has spilled out from the bridge, bringing nauseating stillness to everything around it. I allow myself a quick sideways glance and immediately wince. That’s at least two square meters of bean crops ruined, turned into grey mush. Thanks, asshole.
“State your business or get out,” - I exclaim.
It extends a thousand-fingered foggy palm, preparing to spill something out in front of me. I hold the shovel upright with my torch hand and catch it.
It’s a bird.
It’s a chick, even.
A crow, barely out of its infancy, a clump of soot-like fluff.
Its eyes are clouded with the kind of terror that an adult specimen would be simply incapable of experiencing. It does not resist being handled. It is done screaming. It is fully catatonic, processing its surroundings perfectly yet no longer able to respond.
“And what is this for?”
It draws a mouth in my retinas, the same way it draws eyes. Obsessively yet incompletely, hyperactive yet clueless. The mouth makes a biting motion, but not towards me. Towards the bird. I squint. It does it again.
“You want me to eat it?”
The heap “nods”, mouth and eyes swaying out of sync.
“Where is its parent?”
An adult crow plummets to the pavement in front of me, rended in half. Well, that answers that.
I stare back into the disembodied copy-eyes.
Unlike with the mannequins, I know exactly what it wants. For all the grim it carries, its intent has always been clear as springwater. And I am happier than ever to announce my bankruptcy.
“You think you’re a djinn?” - laughter bellows from my lungs, engulfing the bleak little ten-pence stretch of the world that’s still left visible. There’s only me and the heap, - “You think you can catch my thoughts? You think you can turn them inside out? Give me a fun surprise gift?”
It does not respond. Indecisive.
I bring the cupped palm to my face level, locking the bird-child in the crossfire of our eyes.
“To our lasting friendship, then.”
I make sure to make the motion appear as hesitant as I possibly can while my palm travels towards my opening mouth. My eyes begin to water as our staring contest drags on. It’s rigged. Filthy liar doesn’t actually have eyes.
The crow-chick’s frail, fluffy head hovers between my jaws. I can hear its frenzied breathing patter against my gums as my hand tilts sideways. It doesn’t try to peck me. It’s completely at my mercy.
The heap’s eyes oscillate even faster now, emulated jaws flickering with wild anticipation.
My teeth crash down on the bird’s neck, turning young hollow bones into powder. My fingers close down on its pathetic torso and pull hard. It pops like an overripe grape, neck separating with a “sqrrklllk” that is barely audible and deafening at the same time. I spit the detached head out in front of the heap, blood and bile sputtering from the still-thrashing stump in my palm. I smack the body into the cracked asphalt, and it loses its last claims to the status of “solid object” under my boot.
The heap shudders, eyes glitching between several alternating positions.
“Now you listen,” - the hiss slithers out of my throat, barely clamped down from a growl, my blood mixed with the bird’s spilling from my mouth (it did peck me, in the end), - “You do not give gifts. You do not make surprises. You come in your time, get what we agreed on, and get lost,” - I step towards it, torch extended, and it fractures. The hush of rain and hum of spruce rows, familiar and welcome, rush back into my senses, foreign darkness retreating. The heap backs off, and off, and off. By the time it would be in the middle of the bridge, it’s already much further, jumped back into whatever crevice or fold it emerged from. There’s just me, rain against the bridge, a bird I killed and a bird I didn’t.
I spit out some fluff, and scoop up the bodies. Both are a mess of gore, bile and shit. And I’ll have to bury them somewhere. I still don’t want the crows to hate me.
Kory waits for me at the garage doors, clinging to the disassembled ATV as cover.
“You, Hurt, ?”
“Have a cut on my tongue,” - I slam the button, and the gate rattles closed behind me, - “Could you get me ethanol and a cotton patch? I don’t want a blood infection.”
They’re already handing me both. Medkit opened up on the concrete floor in advance. After packing the carcasses into an airtight bag, I pour plenty of disinfectant over my palms, and then manage the actual wound. Burns, but not too much.
“Thansh, you’re the besht,” - I attempt to smile with my mouth significantly obstructed. Mixed success.
We head back upstairs, towards Kory’s quilt, my tea and the shared unfinished movie. I guess I’ll have to consciously process it, after all. And whatever I come to after watching, no one is here to dispute it.