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It was always embarrassing to Shiori that roses grew in the desert as profusely as in the gardens of Versailles. Of course everyone knew how unnecessary gardens were: but for God himself to underscore their futility in that way, like a professor correcting an argument! Nevertheless she visited the thornbushes in her back yard twice a day, smiling to see how obvious it was, when you thought about it—that they should belong with the cacti, and the spiny, sand-brown lizards. Nor was she one to judge the land for being fecund, though it had once seemed bleak. She was the master of barrenness, and yet she too had been inspired, after coming so far west.
And Juri found her there. “Shiori!” she said softly, leaning forward with two hands on the low wooden fence, dressed in denim and a plaid shirt and an incongruous veil. Cloth hid her vivid hair and wrapped her brown throat like a noose. She was taller than Shiori remembered, with unchanged breasts that seemed, proportionately, shrunken, and she had scars on the webbing of her fingers, as though someone had tried to cut apart the fan of each hand’s bones. Her eyes were also different—not the severe aquamarine of Shiori’s imaginings, like the depth of seawater past which it becomes apparent that the shoals were merely green: but instead a color so close to black that Shiori thought of a ring… A charred ring. The sigil carved in veins and vines of light. But it was nothing, she knew. Just a symptom of the veil Juri wore to shade her face. It was not the case that Juri viewed her with absolute abandon, the sphincter of each iris giving up on its miserly quest to direct and save the sun—
"Shiori," Juri said, more sternly, "put down the pruning shears."
Ah, but it had been too long since she was loved.
"It’s so good to see you," she said. She tossed the shears deliberately to one side and went forward to take Juri’s hands, and put them on her own hips, pulling Juri’s arms across the barrier. "When I sent you that e-mail, I was sure you wouldn’t even remember my name!" Juri was drawing back, but Shiori followed her over, leaning her head against Juri’s plaid-guarded bosom, into the tense crease of side and arm.
Juri hugged her, doubtfully. If there was ever a garden of a girl, it was Juri: such high walls, such lovely blossoms, and in her nothing that would not thrive when dragged out to struggle in the heat. Juri’s careful wishes, fears, vices, sense of order and justice, they were as purposeless as the landscapers who laid out flowerbeds in those fantastic designs—as generals, lining up their men, when all the troops wanted to do was to go out there and fight.
That was what bothered Shiori, she maintained. No part of Juri’s personhood promoted her brilliance; that was an accident divorced from kindness, a jewel that would shine as brightly in a setting of parched dirt. People said, geniuses are not like the rest of us: geniuses can’t concern themselves with trivial matters. But here was Juri, who had flown halfway across the world on account of one email—from an address like [email protected], no less. Didn’t she have a spam filter? Shiori, who had stopped responding to mail from the outside world as soon as she finished high school, who would screw and fuck over anyone out of fussy, purging anger, was much better suited to be exceptional.
But now it would be different. Now everything would be as it should.
Juri had been patting her back while she wept, and at last something must have gotten through to her about the sensations her hands were registering: she pulled away, and said, “If you’re fooling around with me…”
"No," said Shiori, kneeling.
Juri looked shocked. “What are you doing?”
"Taking off my shirt," said Shiori, accurately. She saw Juri’s eyes fall to her tits, and close. "No, look." She shook out her treasures, one by one.
"Shiori," Juri said, for a third time. The sound was so pleasurable that Shiori was almost tempted to shut her own peepers—but more important was Juri’s expression, disbelieving and grieved. Yes, thought Shiori, yes, this is what you always feared, and she beat the butterfly’s wings with languorous ease, feeling the breeze buffet her body, magnified by the action of new limbs. It was so hot that sweat had transferred some of the dye from the cotton of her shirt to the skin of her chest and stomach, her flesh darkened to a bruiselike blue, with her nipples an ugly, startling pink against their dim stained setting; but when she tucked in her shoulders the wings dropped to cloak her in pure white.
"Is this a dream?" said Juri, perhaps to herself. She hopped over the fence, putting only one hand on the post to lever her body across, and walked around to kneel behind Shori, pressing her thumbs into the bare small of her back.
"No," said Shiori with blissful assurance; "no, darling Juri, you’re here and can’t outrun it." Juri was running a hand over the hinge where the left wing met human muscle; she prodded the ragged seam of skin that had split around scales, but Shiori felt no pain. "You see why I couldn’t tell you in the email," she said, but Juri was shaking her head.
"I don’t understand," she said, all precision. "Why haven’t I heard about this? In the news, or on television? Why haven’t you told anybody?" The voice she used made it clear that she could not imagine Shiori willingly staying silent.
“I did tell people,” Shiori said. “My family. My fiancé.” He had only been her boyfriend, but around Juri it paid to exaggerate. “The local radio host.” She smiled, remembering how cautious she had been. She had wanted the miracle to percolate slowly into the awareness of the world, so that she would have time to adjust to her status as a nymph, a fairy, an angel come to earth. “They laughed at me.”
"Oh," said Juri, very gently.
"You should have heard them, Juri," Shiori said. "I didn’t know anyone could be so cruel. They mocked my wings, they mocked my body… fakes, they said, papier-mâché: I wasn’t moving them, they were flapping around in the wind. One man offered to host me on his circus, but his wife said, no, he should only use freaks born with it."
"I think that’s illegal," Juri said. "Freak shows. In the U.S."
"Don’t be stupid," Shiori told her. "Freak shows are immortal. What else are all the two-headed boys and girls supposed to do?" She drew her wings tighter around herself, her slender arms folded across her belly. "Aren’t you amazed," she said, "that anyone could be so blind! So I called you here. I knew that you would see."
"It’s beautiful," said Juri, lifting a length of Shiori’s unbound hair off her damp neck: but it was obvious she didn’t mean the wings, blank as her veil. Unlikely-white as snow. Shiori waited for her to ask, but are you sure this isn’t some cruel prank, like students at Ohtori used to play on Nanami, sending her elephants and elementary schoolers and bells—but are you sure you didn’t make them yourself. Is it possible you sleepwalked to Home Depot and sleepbought twenty yards of frail canvas; can you fly with them. How long they took to grow. She waited for Juri to kiss the exposed knob of her spine, or to weep and throw herself into the dust, saying she was sorry, she was wrong all along, to make Shiori understand so well who was the waste.
Juri did none of that, however. Juri stopped touching her, and stood, so that Shiori saw her shadow fall on the ground at Shiori’s feet. Among the complex shadows of the roses it was one solid stripe of darkness, like a road. “Let’s go inside,” said Juri. “I’d like to see where you’ve been living. I’ll make you tea—even if you don’t have any. I bought some at the airport.”