Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds Read online

  What’s your hurry Bug Boy?

  Oh, never mind. We don’t want to know.

  You’d be mistaken about that leather jacket.

  When Bug Boy got around all the corners and into the little park, he stopped and looked left and right, back and forth, up and down, and then he let the crack in his back widen, and he spread his wings, and a foul odor lumbered out so heavy you might imagine you could actually see it. Bug Boy knew better than to open his wings anywhere near other people. This reluctance to open them was the cause of his odor problem. Because he could not open them often enough, stuff just built up in there next to his skin which looked and felt like uncooked chicken, and it was like you yourself would be if you never got to take your socks off, say. That would be no bed of roses we’d be smelling when you finally did get to take them off and wiggle your toes in the cool air.

  Bug Boy let the bike fall over on its side. Then he ran around in circles, jumping and flapping his arms, and slowly opening and closing his wings to fan out the awful odors. The morning air felt so cool and moist on his back that he couldn’t help bursting out with a little happy chirruping.

  2

  Kameko

  Her students all sat there looking up at her and waiting for her to say something interesting. Or anything at all, really. All she had to do was talk to them in English. The job was not terribly difficult.

  She loved her students. She loved this amazing city. But life was so hard here, and she was so lonely. Everything was very expensive. It might have been better if she spoke the language. It might even have been better if she looked like she shouldn’t really be able to speak the language. Everyone was so nice to regular foreigners, she thought, but she looked just like everyone else until she opened her mouth. Then people seemed shocked, although they were masterful in hiding it, as if she had just lifted her skirt to show them the ugly scar on her upper left thigh from falling out of a tree when she was twelve. Gramps had been so angry at the backyard for letting her fall, and the backyard had been so contrite and crushed with guilt that they had had super strawberries, some as big as baseballs, long after the season was over.

  Japanese might be the language of her dead mother, but she didn’t think she would ever learn it. She tried to memorize a new word every day, but then when she tried to use such a word, she found that it changed when you put it in a sentence in ways she just couldn’t seem to get. Oh, and the “wa” and the “ga” were driving her nuts.

  Her grandfather had been right, even if he hadn’t insisted on it—coming to Japan when all she knew about the country and the language was what she had learned from anime might be a big mistake. There weren’t many ninjas about, for example. And no one seemed to really care about your blood type. Japanese men were either a million polite miles away, or they were pinching and groping her on the trains.

  She might have listened to her grandfather’s gentle suggestions, but she had gone out to the backyard while he cooked dinner, and his crows had come to her and told her yes, she should go to Japan, told her they could take her right now if she wanted. All she had to do was become in tune with the crow culture of the place she wanted to go, and presto change-o whoosh! Away she’d go. But what did she know about Japanese crows? Nothing really. Didn’t they all have three legs? The Yatagarasu? Did they play soccer? Ha ha! You silly girl! The crows made such a racket of cawing and flapping and laughing at her that Gramps ran out still holding his tongs to see what the matter was.

  In the end she flew to Tokyo by jet instead of crows and made her way to the Ueno neighborhood where she would be teaching English at an orphanage run by Catholic nuns. Actually, someone else, a trained teacher would be providing the instruction. All Kameko had to do was talk to the students in English. The simplicity of her duties made her feel even more isolated and set apart from the other teachers, the real teachers. She had a very small apartment with tatami mats and cushions and a low table and a futon. It was perfect. She would never have been able to afford such a place in Tokyo without help from her grandfather. The neighborhood had plenty of crows, and they were very different from the crows at home. These were big and aggressive. Don’t even think about messing with us or we’ll rough you up! They were all the time dive-bombing people they didn’t like. The city put blue netting over the garbage cans on collection days to keep them out of it. That didn’t really work. The crows were smart and worked together to get under the netting.

  “Okay,” Kameko said. “Today we will be talking about pizza.”

  Peas Sue!

  Peas Saw!

  Just as she turned to write the topic on the board, the floor moved. Kameko knew it was an earthquake immediately. She had mistaken the only other earthquake she had ever experienced in Oregon as a big truck passing by on the street outside. This one was unmistakable. This one was the real thing.

  Time slowed.

  A voice came on the intercom, and the students all got up, so slowly, and crouched down under their desks. Kameko was not sure what she should do. The room was shaking. The windows were rattling. Stuff was dancing off the big teacher’s desk and falling onto the floor. There was a roar in the air but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just in her head. It would be stupid to just stand there and be the only casualty, but then she noticed the strange student whose name translated to “Bug Boy” had not gotten under his desk. Instead he was moving quickly toward her, very quickly—scuttling forward on too many legs, she thought. He was at her side almost at once.

  He took her hand and said something in a language that was not Japanese. She shrugged and tried to smile at him but felt her smile flash on and off as the room continued to shake. He pulled at her hand, and she let him lead her to the classroom door. The earthquake seemed to be over by the time they got into the hallway, but he was still pulling her forward urgently.

  The aftershock hit just as Kameko and Bug Boy got outside.

  So many things happened at once. The dark sky was alive with the flapping and screaming of the big gangster crows. The earth was shaking, and the tall buildings were swaying from side to side. She pulled away from Bug Boy and put out her arms for balance, but that did no good. She fell to the pavement. She saw Bug Boy looking up at the sky and waving his arms. He’s got his jacket on backwards she thought as it seemed to open out at either side of his body just as the crows descended and covered him completely. Kameko yelled for help, but no one came. She grabbed her phone and called her grandfather, thinking it was a crazy thing to do even as she was doing it.

  “Earthquake!” she shouted when she saw his face on the little screen. “The crows!”

  3

  The Backyard

  When Cassie was alive she liked to tell the story about how my backyard was in love with me and had tried to sabotage our romance. She would tell about the night she came home with me and first met the backyard.

  Yes, I had owned this house all those years ago, and after I’d married Cassie, she and the backyard came to a kind of détente. It remained my territory. It liked our boy Johnny, but he never really felt comfortable back there. He knew the backyard would be whispering in my ear about anything he got up to.

  But that first night Cassie and the backyard did not like one another. Okay, okay, I was flattered in a perverted way over two women fighting over me, even if one of them wasn’t strictly speaking a woman. In fact, I never ever referred to the backyard as “her” while Cassie was alive. In those days, I had a patio table out there on the deck with a couple of wonderful huge white wicker chairs with comfortable cushions I was always careful to bring in when I wasn’t using them so the Oregon rain would not ruin them.

  I’d left Cassie sitting in one of those chairs while I went inside for wine.

  I heard her squeak like she’d seen a bat or something, and I’d yelled, “What?”

  “Nothing,” she’d called. I decided we could use some snacks, too, so I put some cheese and crackers on a platter.

  From Cassie’s viewpoint, thing
s had not been so serene. She used to describe the sudden drop in temperature as I left her in the wicker chair. Branches snapped. Bushes shook as creatures crept through them. Something scampered over her foot. The patio light above the sliding glass doors dimmed. A sharp wind shook everything and then just stopped suddenly leaving a wet, dead smell floating in the air. A hummingbird flew down in front of Cassie. She carefully raised a hand toward it. It dropped onto the tabletop, obviously dead.

  “What?” I’d shouted.

  “Nothing!” she’d said.

  She didn’t know quite why she did it, but she opened her bag and nudged the body of the dead hummingbird into it. She snapped the bag closed and put it in her lap. I came out all goofy smiles with the wine and the cheese and crackers. The air was cool and sweet with the smell of spring flowers.

  Johnny married a wonderful woman named Natsuki from Japan and they gave us a granddaughter, a beautiful baby, my Kameko. But then a drunk driver killed both Johnny and Natsuki. Natsuki had been an orphan and had no family at all, so there were not so many hurdles for Cassie and I to jump when adopting Kameko.

  Those were wonderful years really, and I treasure them. Cassie’s heart failed suddenly, when Kameko was ten, and I finished the job of raising her alone.

  Well, me and the backyard.

  The hummingbird wasn’t really dead, Cassie would say, zeroing in on the climax of her story.

  The backyard loved Kameko almost as much as I did, maybe even more than it loved me. Cassie and Johnny would have been amazed to see it. I never worried about Kameko when she played back there. Picture this. She’s three-and-a-half and wearing the white, red, green, and orange tie-dyed dress we’d bought her at the Saturday market, and she’s barefoot, and she’s in the backyard talking up to a tree. Her jet-black hair is long down her back. She raises one small fist and shakes it in the air. Or maybe she’s talking to a squirrel up in the tree. Whatever it is, it’s getting a piece of her mind.

  So there he was, Cassie would say, with his crackers and cheese and wine, grinning like a bear. The backyard had gone completely silent. It was a deep listening quiet that you couldn’t help but notice. Any little sound you made yourself bounced around like a scream. And in that deep quiet came a muffled desperate cry from Cassie’s lap. She pulled her purse onto the table and opened it, and the hummingbird shot out like a bunch of angry bees! The backyard blew out a huge sigh of relief that brought all the rustling and whispering night sounds back all at once.

  She’d say I said, “Was that a bird?” And I suppose I might have said that. I don’t remember the details she remembered. I remember that I was already in love with her and that I ached for her and that I was wondering if she would spend the night with me. So she had a bird in her purse? I could live with that.

  Cassie would say the backyard was trying to make me think she was a thief. The backyard was trying to say look look she snatches helpless hummingbirds out of the air and puts them in her purse. Tell her to go away! Tell her to go away!

  Well, that didn’t happen, I would always say—my only contribution to the telling of Cassie’s story.

  My phone made the special sound that meant it was Kameko calling. An odd time for her to call. Shouldn’t she be in school? It would be tomorrow morning in Japan. Maybe she was on a break. We were totally video these days so I put on a smile and took the call ready to see her face swim up on my small screen.

  I could see something was terribly wrong.

  “Earthquake!” she shouted. “The crows!”

  I thought she meant my crows here who were suddenly everywhere. How could she see that? My crows. The ones that always came back to the backyard. The ones who were cautious but not afraid of me. The crows who had told Kameko they could take her to Japan. Did they promise she would find her mother? They poured into the backyard in a huge heap. I had never seen them do such a thing. It was as if they had all pounced on something.

  “He’s gone!” Kameko said on the phone.

  “What?” My eyes were jumping back and forth from the phone to my crows in the backyard. What had they caught?

  Then the crows all suddenly leaped away from what they had been covering and took to the air. A boy, I thought.

  The figure unfolded itself and beat at the air with its own dark wings. I made some kind of startled sound, and it turned black eyes on me, and then it jumped up and scurried toward the rhododendrons. The backyard closed around it like a hug. Not a boy, I thought.

  “Gramps?” I looked down at the phone again. Kameko swept the camera in a wide panorama, but I couldn’t make much of the blurry images and couldn’t tell if things were still shaking.

  “Is the quake over?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said.

  4

  The Bulgarian

  Kameko wondered if the backyard would like this new man in her life. She wondered if the creature her grandfather had always called “The Bulgarian” would make an awkward appearance. Maybe Grandfather’s crows would swoop down and take them all off on an adventure. Maybe Gramps himself would choose this night to show up as a ghost for the first time. That would have been just like him. She smiled to herself. It had been ten years since he died. She had been living in another city, but when she inherited the house and the backyard and the Bulgarian, she moved back to Eugene, Oregon. After all, a translator could work anywhere, and with the money Gramps had left her, she could afford to take only the jobs that interested her. She had a knack for capturing the flow and feeling of Japanese literature and making it accessible to English readers. She could do that in the other direction, from English to Japanese, too. She had a pretty good reputation. Things were going well.

  She would serve poached salmon with local kale and little red potatoes tonight.

  “Mike?” she called.

  “Yeah?”

  “You doing okay out there?”

  “Fine, fine.” Did he sound a little tense? The backyard was probably grilling him in subtle ways he would not actually recognize but would feel at some level. The Bulgarian might scuttle naked from shadow to shadow just to mess with his mind.

  Well, wasn’t meeting the family always a little tense?

  She supposed she was using this evening as a test to see if Mike might be Mr. Right or just another tumble in the hay. He was pretty delicious. Everything was cooking nicely. It wasn’t time for the fish yet. She poured out a couple of glasses of wine.

  Should she maybe put out some cheese and crackers?

  Introduction to “The Grasshopper and My Aunts”

  Nebula-award winner Esther M. Friesner has published 39 novels and nearly 200 short stories. She is also an editor and a playwright. Lately, she’s ventured into the realm of historical young adult fiction with the popular Princess of Myth series.

  About this story, she writes, “I’ve always enjoyed mucking about with mythology, especially Greek myths. They’ve always been a glorious garden of ‘Yes, but what if…?’ for me. One such garden party inspired me to write ‘Thunderbolt,’ a reimagining of Helen of Troy’s childhood abduction, which, in turn led to my writing Nobody’s Princess and Nobody’s Prize. I’m also quite the fan of Victorian/Edwardian literature, especially the language. Oh, the wonderful language! ‘The Grasshopper and My Aunts’ lets me combine the two—happily, I hope.”

  The Grasshopper and My Aunts

  Esther M. Friesner

  It wanted but an hour of noon and my governess was already locked in the library with my aunts, weeping. I could not forbear to smile. Before this, my best efforts at freeing myself from those young women entrusted with my so-called education usually did not show any results until well after luncheon.

  If I put my ear to the door—and I did—I could hear my aunts Domitilla and Euphrosyne taking it in turns to try persuading the poor, distracted girl to stay on in their employ. It was not working. Apparently Miss Cubbins had a mortal terror of any creature with more than four legs and fewer than two, the sole exception bein
g rodents. The grasshopper I had introduced to her embroidery basket that morning fitted the former category most admirably. Had I been previously aware of the pathological nature of her fear, I might have found some other manner of expressing my impulses towards girlish mischief.

  Upon reflection, no. She had insisted I learn fractions. Some offenses call for blood; blood and grasshoppers.

  The library door was made of good, thick oak, harvested from the ancient forests of Dyrnewaed, our ancestral estate. Family tradition had it that the sage, Merlin, had been pent entranced in one of the trees that once clustered the grounds of the manor. If so, his chances for undisturbed eternal slumber ran aground during the reign of Elizabeth, on the day that Hermes, Lord Wielward, decided to sacrifice his oaks in order to fully refurbish and titivate his home, in hopes of attracting the Virgin Queen’s attention and favor on one of her many royal progresses. The trees fell, the manor house was transformed, tongues wagged, and the queen took notice. Her next royal progress descended upon Dyrnewaed like a swarm of insufficiently perfumed locusts, but once she took a closer look at my ancestors’ domestic arrangements, her favor failed to follow. Thus did Lord Wielward’s foolish aspirations nigh bankrupt our family for generations to come, though at least he contrived to retain his life and (greatly reduced) freeholding.

  It was said that if you put your ear to one of the doors that came from Merlin’s oak, you could hear the old wizard bitterly declaiming “Serves you right!” with much relish. If so, his Celtic Schadenfreude was now being overshouted by my aunts’ remonstrations with Miss Cubbins. I knew I was going to be punished, but wanted some advance warning of the severity. Better the devil you know, as the saying partially goes, although at Dyrnewaed the conclusion of that adage is: . . .even if the demon in question does take it upon himself to arrive at formal dinner parties with his latest crowd of brimstone-reeking casual acquaintances and throw off poor Euphrosyne’s seating arrangements entirely, the swine!