Young Writers Society

This is all of a short story in need of critique. If this is too long for one post -- I'm not sure how it's supposed to go with finished short stories, I'm sorry ^^;; -- then I'll edit it down and post in chunks. Thanks in advance!

“February”

Bee sat on her suitcase at the side of the road, chin in hands, with the distinct feeling that she was tilting at windmills. A many-times-folded map was hovering in front of her, anxiously. She stared it down, shuffling a little red dot around the lines of roads for the best path. There wasn’t one.

She would have liked to just fly over the countryside, but things seemed to warp in circles when you least expected it when traveling any distance in this land.

Fine, she told the map. Have it your way. It crumpled to the ground, half-folded, and she tucked the rest together as best she could and put it in the inside pocket of her jacket. The wind started picking up, gusting along the very flat road, and as she pulled her cloak closer over herself she could feel everything beginning to get chapped and red again. It was times like this she kind of wished she had a car, though she was better off without one, and knew it. Still, cars had radios and heat, things that were nice when one got too tired to provide for those things on the fly.

Time to get moving. She had taken a bunch of warming winds in Georgia a few months ago and still had a great tassel of them tied to the trunk handle. She untied one, careful with stiff fingers not to disturb the others, since it was a bad idea to rile up winds and then keep them stuck in place afterwards. Once they had momentum, you had to let them go. This warm breeze made a circle around the trunk as she retied the string into a circle and looped that twice around her pinkie. A sort of barrier of muggy calmness rose around her as the trunk coughed up some prairie air and rose about a foot above the road. She wouldn’t be pushing it any farther from that, not here; let them see her floating eerie, a girl on a trunk on nothing but air. People had been seeing more of her and they would be seeing more as time went on. There weren’t so many driving through the middle of nowhere on this gods cursed road anyway.

She wished again for a radio. She talked to the winds instead, and they carried her on southern, gentrified chatter and polite disappointment at being somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. They wanted a waffle house. She was looking for a good Greek diner at the side of the highway; though there was no substitute for eating classical in ancient Athens there was also nothing like the diners that adorned everywhere from here to the Atlantic. She didn’t have a lot of money for food but wasn’t ready to start cooking out yet, either. If there was a little change she got to eat inside. If not she’d think of something.

At the diner she checked her pockets and looked in the mirror. She really wanted to cut off most of her hair, being altogether sick of brushing it and having it weighing on her head but she felt her credibility would be lost if she got rid of it. She was sure that her head had all these weird lumps, and that her hair would only get short in a very choppy and chunky sort of way, maybe entirely in pieces, and that when it was gone she would feel lighter but look like a madwoman. People thought she was crazy enough as it is.

She found a booth without getting a menu, stared at the formica table top and considered all the specks. The patterned appeared random but it was manufactured; it didn’t have the strange coincidences and intricacies of something natural.

That was the depressing thing. There was so much increase here but most of it was cheap imitation. You had to work harder for anything gotten in the Old World but it was always genuine, trial by the slow fires of time.

The waitress looked kind of annoyed at Bee for just setting up camp at the table, but couldn’t say anything much. She only spent more time than she should have talking to the flannelled truckers at another booth and bringing dishes back to the kitchen. Fine then. Bee ordered a cup of coffee and macaroni and cheese, because these were always hot and filling and cheap. The waitress’ nametag said Ashley. Bee, after being back for years, still thought it funny that people in all of these jobs wore nametags – like otherwise the general public couldn’t be trusted to think of them as properly human. The great equalizer was long roads and tv and nametags.

She slid her saltshaker around the table idly, without realizing quite what she was doing. When she did realize she didn’t stop, since it was good practice to do little domestic things like that. She sat on her hands in case so she wouldn’t cheat and start stuttering them around the edges of the table to call the salt. It all had to be from her head.

She thought about Lute and Onion and felt a little homesick. This kind of roaming was different from what she’d done in the Old World. Then it had been like living in a storybook and she remembered it as such, complete with pencil illustrations. She was in her homeland now and found that though there was an overall unity under the surface ran a dark stream of things she never expected. Like motels, roadside attractions, traveling corporate wolfhounds.

She thought about the blue girl and knew there was a lot more traveling ahead of her before she could go back and scowled, making the face commonly made by perturbed camp counselors or librarians, and sometimes English teachers. It had been a while since she had been or known any of these people, but she remembered the face.

People around here looked down at their feet, but were used to it. They didn’t scowl as much as she did, just looked down. So many other things were more worth the wrinkles. No one looked hard enough at each other to notice expressions much anyway. It was good to be like the plains. The plains might have driven a few crazy but they never killed anybody.

Maybe they’ll kill me, she thought, and sat drinking and eating quietly, letting her mind be quiet and her body soak up the feeling of inside.

Then it was back out, on her suitcase, onto the road. She slept nights inside of it – not like a bed, but it was much bigger than anyone could imagine, and it stretched inside as she did in her sleep. The clothes were comfortable enough of a mattress but there were books and metal things underneath and that could be slightly problematic. At least she was safe at night. No one was going to open up an old suitcase hidden past the weeds at the side of the road in the middle of the night.

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When she found a small town, she set up on the corner of Main Street – where the highway became narrow and old fashioned for the sake of the town and it’s little shops, pharmacy and nail salon and bar – and got to work in the one way she could that mattered to these people in a way they could see.

She opened up her trunk and pulled out a strange assortment of things, things which one would never think to fit inside a traveling suitcase. She pulled scarves out of her mouth and made her suitcase fly around her head and then held out a top hat for money, but not before she pulled a weasel out of it and pretended to be puzzled, then turned the weasel into a rabbit and said, “That’s better,” holding out the hat again. She only did this when some people had stopped, just a small group of them – a couple of kids, an older couple, two of the ladies from the nail salon who had gotten bored waiting inside surrounded by glossy posters and magazines.

She bowed, they moved on; and she shrugged, packed up, and checked the hat. There was just enough for Chinese, if she went for a mess of egg rolls, always cheap and spicy and filling if you had enough of them. Score.

Bee took her food outside and around the corner, sitting Indian-style on back service steps of corrugated steel. The first egg roll went down quickly and made a lump in her throat so big she thought it was showing, though it wasn’t. She approached the next carefully, like it was an animal. Food could bite back. The feeling that somebody was watching her alighted on the back of her neck and she turned to be face to face with a delicate and powerful cat.

Could have sworn that was a person behind me, she thought. The cat looked at her like it wanted to say something but wasn’t sure if should in present company.

“What’s up?” she asked, not knowing what else to say. Besides, the cat wanted somebody to say something and it certainly wasn’t going to be first to break the silence. He stepped closer and meowed in response, though that meow sounded a lot like The sky is up, you idiot, and it’s gray and I’m bored.

Something familiar entered her head. “Ok cat”, she said, “You’re the life principle, more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here.” The cat arched its back and rubbed itself against her side, then stepped carefully over her crossed legs, dipping paws in the space between carefully, testing the waters. It crossed over, then purred its way around, dipped over her legs again and made a nest in her lap. She had never seen a cat do this before; its sleek black body was warm and fit nicely in that space but she couldn’t quite tell if she was comfortable with the arrangement.

Hey You, the cat said. Feed me something.

“I don’t really have anything you’d like.”

You lie, it said back. You’ve got an egg roll.

Bee was surprised that this was such a smart and human cat, and out of shock she broke the egg roll in half, stuffing one in her mouth and putting the other in the palm of a flat, outstretched hand. The cat took a dainty bite at first and must have found it to his liking because he grabbed the whole chunk next and tried to eat it in one go. She had decided the cat was a he, though she hadn’t actually checked. He just was.

You’re right, he said. On both accounts.

“Oh good. I kind of like that being right thing.”

I’m sure it’s useful.

“Lately it hasn’t mattered about right, but being convincing.” She tried not to sigh theatrically, though she kind of wanted to. “Sometimes I think I’m left without either.”

The cat twitched his tail and it brushed against the inside of her knee.

No matter what I say to that I will have invalidated your argument.

Damn cats, she thought, and then Whoops, as it twitched its tail again, telling her I Heard That.

Don’t stand up, he said. I know you’re going to stand up.

She was going to stand up – she wanted to get going soon – but she had barely started shifting her leg muscles, barely braced one hand against the step behind her. She settled in again, and waited a second.

All right. Going to tell you something proper now. You’ve got to get away from this druge.

“Don’t I know that…”

You’re young, stupid. Very impressionable.

The cat stood up and waved his tail in her face, then jumped down the steps, taking two at a time. He trotted off, nonchalant, crossing the street and disappearing into the dead rushes on the other side. She didn’t think to follow until his tail had slipped from view, and then she only shrugged and got up slowly as if she were a lot older.

He had reminded her of the Old World, and she remembered leaving it to come back. It had almost – but not quite – become her home.

Remembering what it was to come home after so long – how it was to go looking for magic again after the jolt of finding so little – she went to schools. Elementary schools she had figured out, divided between the innocence – well, almost – of really little kids and the courage of ten year olds who thought they were Big. She refused to go near middle schools, feeling them as black holes for magic, sucking off little tendrils of personal power and hope every single time she flew over one.

Bee got a kick out of herself around high school kids. She loved the way they would give her The Look in all of its forms and the way she would react inside her head. Some thought they were ancient Greek heroes, and some actually were, but these were never one and the same. It was the difference between a swagger and an inutterable, unshakable faith in possibility and there was something magical about the latter, perhaps because the entirety of the Old World was an exercise in the possible.

They made her feel old, and she would dig into her suitcase for a pocket mirror to check the lines of her face. When I was your age, she thought. When I was your age I was traveling the Old World. I’d seen more in a year than you’ll probably seem in a lifetime, so don’t look at me like that.

The memories of her traveling year and her return home just afterward were perhaps more immediate than the memory of whatever she’d been doing for the past few years, which was a lot of different and odd things. She checked the mirror and realized that she still looked like she could be in high school. With her long dark hair pulled up off and around her face she just looked like she was very learned but otherwise too young for what this world expected of you, which was to stop dreaming. She had almost given into it, sacrificing dreams at night for those that floated along in her waking hours. The blue girl might have been a dream, but really wasn’t; and some days she thought different things. Either way she kept going.

Either way she’d find somebody else to teach, or to learn from.

Either way she’d find another well. She had found two. Another one would be coming, though she didn’t know where or when – these things always happened in threes. Then the ideas would come bubbling up from the ground again, more natural and valuable than oil, to pop over trees or plains or other tracts of land, and over people’s heads. They would get the spritz, the reflected fragments, and she would have found a secret worth giving back to a world.

At some other school in another small town in another small corner of a flat and endless state Bee watched how busses rolled in, and then away. She walked along the line of them in the morning, and then again in when school was over.

She put her hands in her pockets. She scanned the faces. She found nothing, and kept walking, and then had to stop. Two teenagers, gangly and imposing, appeared out of thin air.

The girl was the dark kind of Irish; clearly there was selkie in her family somewhere, and not too long ago. Bee could almost see the clothes on her clinging tight and comfortable and warm like sealskin. The guy was a shape shifter of another kind. He was splotchy and Bee thought she’d seen him before.

They were used to the prairie kind of bleakness, looking out at something beyond the surroundings Bee could never shake off. Oh yeah. They were looking at her. She realized how she must have looked to those two – iridescent and on the brink of changing, violently, still, like a photograph of a storm. That’s how the few full of magic had always looked when she was a kid, thought she hadn’t completely gotten what she was seeing until later. It made her uncomfortable. So did them appearing. She’d never gotten the hang of that trick and had become very suspicious of it.

“What are you doing here?” it was the girl that came forward, hands on her hips, accusatory. She was probably a different one in this little town, and in small towns especially that made a person live like a criminal.

“Looking for something, traveling. I’ve been at it a long time.”

“Well, whatever it is, it isn’t here. Maybe you’d better move on.” She sounded like one of those old-town cops from the thirties, relentlessly sending on drifters. Bee was suddenly annoyed. She put down her suitcase and sat on it.

“I said.” The girl swished her hair. High School girls. Bee was glad she’d circumnavigated this possibility for herself. “They don’t really want your type around here, if you know what I mean.”

“So, what are you trying to protect? Not me. I’m not afraid of witch hunters and you can see that. I’d have left but now, I’m interested.”

The two were silent for a moment, not used to this. They had run for a long time on their brand of intimidation and now that someone was challenging their wintry prowesses they had to regroup.

Something animal passed between the two, before the guy growled “Fine, then.”

His voice was like boulders tumbling over each other in the scrubby Colorado mountains, and suddenly the three – two cocky shape shifters and Bee, surprised, with her luggage – were in a grove of towering, deep-breathing pines.

“We really wanted to know how you’d got here, and some other things. He sme – sensed you. My name’s Ravenna, by the way.” It sounded prepared, and Bee knew that the girl’s name was obviously invented; a name of ego and convenience, and Bee was not going to call her by it.

“It’s ok. I know what you both are,” she said, recognizing the guy at last. The girl had meant to say smelled, but stopped herself, unsure; but now Bee remembered. He had to be the misplaced jackal she’d seen a few months ago, and that she’d followed; he acted much unlike a real animal and finally changed back in a crumple of death-pendants and dark clothes. It had been night and the two had barely gotten a glimpse of each other.

But after that she’d had bad luck with directions and animals until she was in effect driven north and out of the state. That was last – what? November. The feeling of just-cold, bare tree hostility was the same as now. She had gotten a sort of paranoia after her camps had been scattered, her winds redirected, and had seen a drab yellow old junker on the roads too often and too silently for it to be coincidence, and for a car that old. She now could imagine how he came to the girl’s house, knowing he’d been seen; that they’d both planned, shivering and barefoot, over the phone; how they’d gotten into the car and killed the radio and drove, driver gripping the wheel with white knuckles (him) and shotgun biting nails and staring murderously out into the darkness (her). She imagined the wave of hunting magic that radiated out from them, driving out the intruder who just might be able to reveal their secrets.

“You can use it,” Bee said. “You don’t have to be so quiet. You can do more than driving others like yourself way out of your reach.”

The girl seemed to remember also, remembering November nights and driving. “We can’t let anyone know. Anyone. I’m sure you understand. It’s like…” she trailed off, not knowing how to explain it or doubtful that she should even try.

Looking at these two with their paranoia, their conviction, their bleached-out skin, she realized consciously what had been nipping at the back of her mind for a while now, through the months, years, of watching desperate people in diners. “You feel like you’re the only ones alive in a town of corpses.”

“Yes! That is it, exactly. We’re the only ones with something, and even we’re looking a little dead lately. I can’t even imagine what’s going on in their heads, if there is anything, and they try to impose it on us and we can’t go anywhere.”

The girl was just taking a breath and was about to rant more, but Bee started in. “It’s not just you. It’s not just here.” The girl closed her mouth. “People all need magic to be people. You can survive without it but you’re – lost. You didn’t know that?”

The girl shook her head.

“Jeeze, what do they teach you? All people are magic. Though the rest of the world has power and more so, there is something special and different about the kind that people can control. They become starved without it, without realizing it, and most go out searching for something – very few find it. They think they’ve found peace of mind, or the land, or a god. They think they’ve found a secret and know it’s not something that can be put in a bottle; those lacking are absolutely sure it can be bottled and sold. And people came here, thinking magic was the cause of their problems. They didn’t want to bring any along.”

The guy spoke up again, still looking at the pine needles. “If everybody needs it, why aren’t we all dead?” She caught something beyond the question in her ears. Maybe he wanted to be dead, or to prove her wrong. Or both, that he would drop dead soon and be done with this whole thing, knowing that he got to bite back at somebody on the way.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out. I’m trying to make sure that doesn’t go away.” Bee knew again all of the frustration of her travels. She still didn’t know where it was coming from. She thought she might, but it was teetering just away from her grasp and had been for a long time. Maybe it wasn’t there at all, and she was just imagining that it was.

The girl became hostile again. “You shouldn’t be trying anything. You should go. Things are fine; we’d be the way we are and they the way they are no matter what anyone did.”

No. “It’s that kind of thing that keeps everything the way it is. You want it to be the way it is? Maybe you want to be like prey.”

“We’re hunters,” said the jackal boy.

“You’re not acting like it.” Bee crossed her arms. Sometimes it was a battle of stubbornness, in which case she could hold out for a while.

Between them there was another kind of animal wave, something akin to the way dogs would bark at the shockwaves before an earthquake, or birds knew north. They both, at the same time, transformed; the girl took on a shape that was big and dark and spotted but shifting, like a shadow wrapped around something with ambiguity of wing and limb; and the jackal-boy was his other form again, feral and snarling. This was the other way they drove people out, by becoming nightmares that could chase you on, across the plains; they could fly farther and run faster. Opposition was toast.

They lunged forward, with growls and other sounds of grating and boulders. Bee felt defiant for a moment, and rushed them back. There was no point in fighting them – they were in high school for godssakes – but she wanted to make a show of it. This she rationalized later: but it remains that she surged forward as they did, and slipped between them just on a bend in the fabric of the land. She was pushed out and up on the land’s own spirals, and on her suitcase, over the pines and their dark forms. Fine then. They could be like that. Their loss.

And so, with a flourish and a missed realization, Bee was back on the road.

She wished she was able to inspire fear or respect, or any of those kinds of emotions that got people interested in what you had to say so you could get through with it without interruption, stagnation, or being chased off with a shotgun like a trespasser on mental property.

Watchful, she had an eye out for people that were animals and animals that were people. They were the ones that could change. She wanted to find them first, hoped they could put some kind of double-nature to work, in a World where having two skins was little found and often needed.

Any place that she felt them converging, she traveled. Up the state and around, to the edge of the mountains and back onto flatness. She would find something in the center, she reasoned: things were always found at the heart, even it seemed empty.

There were a few dogs along the way that had almost become people, and had not quite made it; or people who had become dogs and found they liked it better that way and were definitely not going back, not ever. She watched them lie in the shade of the occasional tree, or under porches, cars, trailers.

Once she had to stop completely, seeing an entire pack clustered under one jacked-up truck. The big Dalmatian was asleep and so was his buddy, a little terrier, tucked over front spotted paws. There was a greyhound also, gangly and spread out but awake, watching with his head on the pavement. Bee couldn’t help but bend down and rub his head and scratch him around his collar. This one had definitely been human at one point, and she lay on her stomach, crossing the border between driveway and road, and talked to him. He only looked back like he would sing the blues, but was too tired for even that.

She caught another trail and got looking for more dogs, or trapped descendents of the Old World, but found only another branch of the highway and another marshy town. She walked through it, careful, remembering the two kids who had kicked her out. Everyone else was probably that careful. She remembered being a kid herself – though much younger – and learning (but not the hard way) that above all else she had to be careful.

After nothing and yet another road back to the sideway she stopped for a sandwich and sat down to eat it only when she got down the road a ways. She wanted to eat in peace and maybe add in some spices or something good from her suitcase. She sat down, got out some powders and a dried and peeled apart onion and started using her case as a table, putting things together. She sneezed, something ominous, and guessed it was just the pepper.

She did not get to eat in peace. Something black, bulletlike and very powerful streaked from the ditch in the side of the road, grabbed some food, and kept going at almost the same speed. She stood up and saw pricked ears, a bobbing tail, and panther confidence.

“You again!”

The cat bounded away, half her sandwich in his mouth, trying to make a getaway across the empty road and into the grass of the plains. No other cat would try it. It was still the same very human He she had met before.

She jogged behind him and scooped him up, unceremoniously, from behind the forelegs. He was a very bendy sort of creature. “No, cat, I don’t think you’re going anywhere.”

The cat yowled when she grabbed him, but he was just yelling My name is not Cat!

“Then you better tell me what it is, because you’re coming with me.”

What are you even doing?

“We’re building a myth. There aren’t enough in this place.”

You don’t stay in place long enough. You move, you ghost, how can you put anything into people? He licked one front paw delicately, trying to look to be above such quandaries.

Good question. She didn’t know the answer. She did know they had to keep moving, that staying still wasn’t going to do anything. There was a lot of ground to cover; lots of highways, backcountry roads, suburban neighborhoods, valleys and mountains and miles of flat, flat plains.

Moving? Like this?

He jumped out of her arms and started walking back the way she’d came. So he had, probably, been waiting for her, crouched and watching and only pretending to be nonchalant. He stepped delicately off the road and onto the expanse of wind-flattened, yellow grass. Some started to rise up behind him, hiding his lithe dark form from view. Bee followed, more slowly. The grass was getting greener from the roots and the ground had thawed a little and become marshy, sinking and supple when she put her weight down.

The cat had complimenting power. She was impressed. She beckoned to her suitcase and followed more quickly now, paying attention to each step and putting down little pieces of thought down as she walked, giving the grass a boost. The cat – he wanted her to follow – between her and the cat they would figure things out. They would change things. When Bee looked back she saw that the green was light and tentative but spreading outward in a slow and steady wave.

They were calling forth. She did not need another well, though maybe she would keep looking for one. After all, the wells ran deep into what? The soft earth, which spread almost uniform – beneath rocks and people and steel – all the way from coast to coast. They would be the wells and bring things up from where they had lain deep for centuries and let the bubbles of magic burst above the heads of the people, and the lap of the land.

Ok Cat, she thought. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

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