nature – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #135B: “Afterimage” by Anna Zumbro

edited by David Steffen

The bay air felt strange on Domenico’s skin. He’d been here every evening for weeks, but this was the first time in a while — years, really — that he’d taken his body with him. He’d forgotten the kiss of breeze on flesh. The rental canoe’s heave and sway troubled his bad hip. His arms, at least, retained much of their strength from his youth, and paddling was not as difficult as he’d expected. In his early career he’d flipped sedated hyenas and wolves to implant trackers. He’d had Johan with him then, of course.

Ahead of him waves tumbled over the island’s rocky shore, water copper-flecked in the late-day sun. From the docks behind him came the low coos of a flock of eiders. Bioluminescent symbols flashed on the backs of his hands: blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, true north. He fished a pair of musty gloves from the pockets of Johan’s old bomber jacket and slid them on to block the blue glow. Being human here was enough trespass.

His daughter’s ringtone chirped on his wristwatch, and after a moment’s pause he accepted the call, regretting that he hadn’t set the watch to Do Not Disturb. But knowing Addie, she’d keep calling if she couldn’t reach him, or send the Coast Guard to bring him back.

“Addie.” His voice was clipped, a little breathless. “What’s up?”

“Before you lie to me, I can see you,” she said. “You’re in Dad’s green jacket and the knit cap I made you. You’re alone in the canoe like an absolute fool. If you’ve got any bait, toss it overboard.”

He’d given her tracking permissions after his fall last December. For emergencies. She’d always been the anxious sort, and she had far too broad a definition of emergency. The eiders were nearby, not fifty yards away. Of course she would have gone to the local ridealong listings and picked one of them. He retrieved a small bag of granola from his pocket and cast a few pieces in the water. Three of the birds approached, splashing after the food with eager ah-ooos. A large male plunged for a drifting morsel, revealing the telltale bands ringing his legs.

He chuckled. “So here’s my little albatross.”

“And the ancient mariner. Papa, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Addie swore more than she used to. Since Johan’s death, she spoke more authoritatively to Domenico. She seemed to assume that, as a widower, he lacked not only partnership but a necessary measure of pushback. She seemed to have forgotten that Johan had always been the risk-taker, even if she did remember the Coleridge poem he loved.

“I can handle it. I’m sorry about the show.” His grandchildren’s music day camp was putting on a concert. He’d excused himself with the excuse that the folding-chair seating wouldn’t agree with his hip, which was true anyway, and promised them he’d hear all their songs at home. The terns would be leaving in less than a month, and he might not get another chance. At least he’d made it far enough that she couldn’t stop him. “Where are you? I hope you didn’t leave early.”

“I’m in the parking lot.” There was a pause of several seconds before she responded. She was shifting her consciousness back and forth between the neurochipped eider and her own body. “There were 17 hosts available tonight just in the bay alone when I hopped on. You want to tell me why you couldn’t just enjoy this from home — enjoy your own life’s work?”

It was his work, and that of many others. Like Johan. Their names graced a few patents of early models that helped humanity crack the mysteries of the animal kingdom, though the technology had progressed remarkably since they retired. Just as important as the patents were the research papers they’d co-authored, cracking the code of animal cognition and behavior. It was their research that demystified magnetoreception in deer and dogs and described how starlings choreographed their murmurations. But their scientific work was symbiotic with their relationship: from their meeting in freshman-year biochemistry to their early married days as they toted Addie on missions around the world to test prototypes on different species, Johan had been a part of every professional achievement he’d had. They were driven by the same narcotic thrill of experiencing an animal’s instinct, its world, firsthand. Not just through its eyes with a camera, but thanks to the technology they’d helped develop, through its senses. We’re much more similar to other creatures than we appreciate, and their education of humanity has only begun, Johan liked to say at the conclusion of his lectures. Far from strangers, they are our fellow passengers on this spaceship called Earth. A onetime English lit major and occasional poet, he’d always delighted in rhetorical flourishes, even to the end. He probably would have quoted poetry as his last words if he’d been able to, if Domenico had been there to hear him.

Addie was too old for “just trust me” or “none of your business,” and so, perhaps, was Domenico. “I’m here for me. And for your dad.”

The eider flapped its wings. He placed another piece of the granola bar on the bench opposite him to see if it would join him in the boat. It did, and so did one of its unchipped companions. Instinct, nothing more. Addie was not the captain of her eider.

He’d heard the military was working on the ability to control its trained dolphins through neurochip ridealongs, a prospect that would have horrified his younger self. The use of chipped songbirds for surveillance, an early way the technology had been co-opted, had always bothered Johan the most. Fire, the wheel, the blade, the internet: no tool resisted use as a weapon.

“For Dad? You can’t — you can’t mean what I think you mean, Papa. Don’t do this,” Addie said. “The kids and I love you, you know that. We need you.”

“Oh, no, no.” Laughter nearly escaped him before he stopped himself. It wasn’t funny. Why did he want to laugh? Because it was life that had brought him out here, or the possibility of it. Life and lightness and hope that had lately filled him so that he scarcely recognized himself from the shell he’d been for months prior. “You thought I was coming out here to die somehow? I’m sorry to worry you. Nothing like that. I’m coming back, I promise.”

Her sigh crackled over the wristwatch speaker. “Then what’s going on? You don’t need to come out here to remember him. Stop scaring me. What if you capsize? Come back now.”

“Addie…” She’d taken Johan’s death hard, too, but their grief had led down different paths. Addie, at least, seemed to have emerged from the darkest stretch of hers. He did not want to pull her back in.

They’d moved to this Maine college town when Addie was nine and bought a house only a minute’s walk from campus. She was fascinated by the squirrels. (So were the undergrads; in Domenico’s experience, every college had legends about its squirrels.) On one of her first ridealongs in Maine, her squirrel host was struck by a car and killed. She said, later, that she didn’t feel any pain, just the shock of finding her mind thrust back into her own body without warning. He’d hoped, in a way, that the experience might calm her fears of death.

But she was traumatized, and he and Johan were not prepared for the way it manifested. She hid food under her bed and in her closet. She climbed trees with a wild and foreign boldness. Traffic unnerved her, understandably, but so did hawks and eagles. Johan mused that the connection might be reciprocal: that a part of the squirrel’s consciousness had survived, like an afterimage encoded in Addie’s neurochip, and that it was still sending impulses to her brain. Domenico dismissed the theory. The technology had not been designed that way. She was identifying with the squirrel out of grief born from the intimacy of experiencing its final moments, that was all. Grief changed people. At any rate, the phase passed after some weeks and Addie was back to her obsessive neatness, once more wary of heights and indifferent to birds of prey.

He had never told her of Johan’s theory about the squirrel and didn’t intend to now. He looked at the eider perched on the bench as if it were his daughter and tried to meet its eyes. “Last year, around the time he got sick, your dad often used to go to the island through the terns. He joked about coming out here from his hospital bed when I’d have to leave at night. I told him he shouldn’t, thought it might mess up his vitals and keep him admitted longer. But anyway. You know him.”

Johan’s interest in arctic terns had always tilted toward obsession. He envisioned renting a boat and tracking the entire 25,000-mile migration with ridealongs the whole way, enthusiasm undimmed by Domenico’s maybe-next-years.

“We don’t know what the host animal experiences when its human ridealong dies during the link,” Domenico said. “And — I don’t know what he was doing at the exact time he passed — but I’m certain he was accessing terns during his hospital stay. And.”

For a moment, only the eider cooed in response. Then he heard a noise from the speaker, a gasp that might have been a cry.

“I’m not certain,” he said. “That’s why—”

“Papa, no.” He could hear her frown, her clenched fingers, in the strain of her voice. “It’s been a year. You always said he was alive in his work, but I didn’t think you meant literally—”

“Right. It’s just a theory.”

“There’s a therapist I saw for a few months, back in the fall, remember? She’s a little strange, but so helpful. Dad’s still here in our memories. But he’s gone.”

The oar slipped along the gunwale and he grabbed it just in time. Addie’s eider flapped its wings but stayed put. Somewhere a gull shrieked.

“I do know. Rationally, I know. It’s bunk. I just need to test it. Get near them as a human, see how they react. Assure myself. Maybe your therapist would call it closure.”

When she didn’t respond, he lifted the oar and dipped it into the water. The canoe cut through the gentle water toward the small tern-spotted island. His fingers ached as he gripped the oar. Once the boat started moving, the eiders departed into the darkening sky.

“Papa.” Addie’s voice once more, intrusive but gentle. “Against my better judgment, I’m going now. Be quick, okay? And safe.”

“I will.”

“If you drown out here I’ll kill you.”

“Love you too, sweetie.”

It was quiet now but for the slosh of waves, the shrill chatter of nesting terns, and the percussive thrum of his own pulse. He knew this island well from a bird’s perspective, having gone on ridealongs with almost all of the chipped terns over the past several weeks. All but one. Every time he checked, tern B107 showed as occupied. Ridealongs ended automatically after two hours, but with B107 there was never a pause, never a flash from red to green on the list. He’d checked at all times of day and night.

“Probably a malfunction with its chip.” He muttered this aloud. Spoken words carried weight. “That’s all it is.” He kept rowing.

Maneuvering the canoe as close to the rocks as he was willing to risk, he turned it parallel to the shore. The screen showed the occupied B107 within 30 yards, along with dozens of others. As well as he knew them, his failing eyesight in the fading light could not distinguish one individual from another. That was fine. Johan would recognize him.

The terns squawked in wary regard. Fledglings peeked out from beneath their parents. He knew well the famous defensive instinct that would lead them to attack and so he sat, immobile, until several stars twinkled in the dark above him. The birds remained on their nests, patient in their collective standoff with this tall intruder. B107, whichever it was, did not break ranks.

“Come on.” His voice was louder than he intended.

The terns shrieked. Six or seven zoomed toward the canoe, sharp red beaks aimed at his head. He put his arms up against the assault. The oar slipped from his grasp. He leaned over the edge of the boat, feeling it buck and roll beneath him, and the oar vanished into the dark water.

The pain only hit him once the birds had retreated. His arms bled from pecks and scratches beneath the holes they’d torn in Johan’s jacket sleeves. He remained still for several minutes, keeping his arms over his head in case they came back. A cool breeze cut through the holes and made his wounds sting. Slowly, he reached under the yoke and found the second oar. Stroke to starboard, stroke to port, each one accompanied by a sharp shudder. The terns, observing his slow retreat, did not move to follow him.

After twenty strokes he paused and rested the oar in his lap. His bad hip hurt almost as much as his arms. “Come on, B107,” he said again, softly. “You know me. You know me.”

But now every bird in the bay left him alone.

The sky was winter-dark and nothing shone on the waves. He could barely see the water. He struggled to remain upright, to avoid crumpling into the canoe and disturbing its balance. The fabric lining of Johan’s bomber jacket was binding to his bleeding cuts; it would dry there and hurt like hell to take off.

No answer was its own answer. It had always been a long shot. Johan had said to him once, Now that we’ve decoded animal cognition, the last great mystery is death. In the abstract, the phrase struck him as sublime. Still, even then, he’d responded: Someday we’ll solve that, too.

It was just like him to want a simple answer to a complicated question. But the simple answer was this: he had loved the man who loved these birds, and loved him still. Perhaps the birds, who did not startle at his muttered curses as he picked up the oar again, knew this and held back their aggression for that reason.

To the north, a faint green aurora shimmered. Domenico removed his gloves so he could read the glowing compass on the back of his right hand. Arms burning and leaden, he began to paddle back toward the mainland. He prayeth best, who loveth best, both man and bird and beast. It was the only line of that albatross poem Domenico consistently remembered, aside from the bit about water, water, everywhere that Johan, ever the pedant, always said people got wrong. He could hear his laugh, now — picture him sitting on the other seat of the canoe — hear him saying, Interesting hypothesis about the tern, but how could I confine myself to one creature’s mind when I already live in yours?

“Help me get home, then,” Domenico said to the empty bench, “and don’t let on to Addie what a fool I’ve been.” A line of lights marked the shoreline, hundreds of agonizing strokes away, but the eiders cooed and the terns watched and even though his afterimage of Johan couldn’t quote as much poetry as the real one, it was enough, it would have to be enough, to get him back to shore.

2596 words

Author’s Note: This story was inspired by a picture from a writing challenge showing an elderly man in a boat with a large bird. The two figures looked almost as if they had an understanding with one another, and I started imagining a form of shared consciousness between them. The image also reminded me of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and the story emerged from there.

Anna Zumbro is a short fiction writer whose stories have appeared in LeVar Burton Reads, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, and other publications. She teaches high school English and journalism.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #102A: “On a Smoke-Blackened Wing” by Joanne Rixon

edited by Ziv Wities

The airplane is gray and gleaming, rising off the ground into the fog of early morning like a magic trick, obscured and then revealed, impossible. The engines roar too loudly, like they will tear down the sky. They roar and roar, and then—

The transformation. The wind under the airplane’s wings buckles as the wings buckle, shake, separate into a beating of hundreds of wings. Out of the fog we come. This time, this first time, we are geese: black-brown wings and furious hearts. We fly awkwardly, at odds with the turbulence; we are newborn, but already the flock is forming as our instincts awaken in the air and we orient ourselves not against the ground or the stars but against each other.

***

Avie

I’ve always loved birds. When I was five I asked my dad for a bird feeder so I could see birds out my window when I was sitting at my desk doing remote school, but he just handed me his phone and said, “you know how to look up videos.” I do know, but bird videos aren’t as cool as having my very own bird friends that came up to my window to say hello. And anyway, I already had a tablet when I was five because kindergarten went on remote school after the wildfire that burned down the school building and made us have to drive in the middle of the night to my uncle’s house and sleep on his floor for two whole weeks, so I just used my tablet.

I asked a bunch of times for a bird feeder and my dad said, no, we didn’t have any place to put a bird feeder, and then even when we moved to the good wildfire refugee housing he still said no, the birds didn’t need me to rescue them from the wildfires. But then on my birthday when I turned seven my dad got me a present and it was a bird feeder! It’s a special kind with different colored windows just like our apartment building, so you can put different seeds in it so each bird can eat their favorite food. Blue jays eat peanuts! But other birds, like sparrows, only like small seeds, you can tell because their beaks are so tiny!

My birthday was two days ago and this morning I hung the feeder out on the branch of the magnolia tree with some wire, and my dad helped, and almost right away birds started coming! I saw a blue jay and some tiny ones with black on their heads and a bright yellow one that was a goldfinch! My birthday present from my aunt and uncle was an app for my tablet where I can take a picture of a bird and it tells me its name and all its facts like what color its eggs are. I think they talked to my dad so they knew I was going to have birds! This is definitely my best birthday ever.

***

The next time, we are grackles. Bodies the size of a clenched fist, sleek slick ink-black feathers, pale eyes that gleam like pearls in midnight moonlight. We flock at first in the shape of the plane we used to be, remembering how it felt to be bolts and panels, wires and combustion. Each passenger, now winged, remains in our assigned seats for an instant before our bodies realize the seats, too, are black birds and we are all lifted on the currents of air that have been disturbed by our transformations.

We fly.

***

Avie

My bird app has lots of sections, like one section for different kinds of birds that perch on branches, and a section for owls and hawks, and a section for birds that live on the beach. There’s a lot that don’t live in California where I can ever see them. They live in places where I could never even go, like New York or the Amazon Rainforest or an island in the ocean.

The saddest birds are the ones with a little star beside the place they live in. The star means they used to live there but they don’t live there anymore because they’re completely dead. Maybe humans hunted them and ate them until they were all gone. Or maybe they got all burned up in a wildfire, like my mom in her car, or maybe they flew away to the moon!

That’s a joke, birds don’t live on the moon. I know that because I’m in second grade now and we saw a movie of astronauts and robots on the moon and other places like Mars where there aren’t any birds. During the movie I looked out my window and I saw a pretty bird I never saw before that was soft and gray and gold-pink. It was looking right at me! I tried telling it about the moon but it flew away.

***

The drone that becomes a Mexican sheartail was manufactured in Mexico. The sheartail darts—we flex our wings, our speed like a flash of light off the water.

The American-made drone becomes a red-throated loon. Another becomes an ivory-billed woodpecker. We goshawk, we fish eagle. We pelican.

We shimmer and disperse, we coalesce. We are becoming powerful.

***

Avie

I can’t decide which kind of bird is my favorite. Hummingbirds are really, really pretty. I saw one this morning perching on the tip of the magnolia branch right beside my window! It was small and shiny just like I remember and it had a bright red patch on its throat and it looked right at me with one eye and then the other eye! I think hummingbirds are my favorite.

My bird app says these kind of hummingbirds are star-birds: “Allen’s hummingbirds are extinct in the wild.” I’m getting really good at reading because my tablet came with an app that tells you what words mean and how to say them out loud. I wanted to ask my dad why my bird app says my hummingbirds are extinct, which means all completely dead, when there was one in the magnolia tree, but he had his work headphones on and his boss gets annoyed if he misses answering a customer. So I didn’t have anyone to ask. Maybe my tablet is wrong and the bird in the tree was a different kind of hummingbird. The picture I took was sort of blurry.

***

For many days the planes and drones cower on the ground. We circle the globe on the high currents, gaining flock members in ones and twos, from wind-blown balloons and children’s toys. In our bones we remember the sky full of our wingbeats, our shadows darkening the ground like a storm system from mountain to mountain.

Nectar-eaters and animal-eaters dispute approaches—there we argue, here we converse, there we shriek. Our flock contains contradictions, but we parliament, and eventually we settle under the leaves and soften our voices. Soon, the airplanes take wing and we wait, using the night-hunters’ stillnesses, until the sky is filled with thousands of machines. Now we rise.

***

Avie

The funniest thing ever happened today! I was heating up my breakfast roll in the microwave and outside the window I saw so many birds and they were all walking on the ground. They were all sizes, with long ostrich legs and short duck legs and black and brown and orange and blue… some of them were big fat gray birds with funny faces. Those ones I didn’t even need my bird app to find their names because I already knew they were dodos!

I wanted to tell my dad that there were dodos in the courtyard, but he had his headphones on and was talking in his weird customer voice, so I just waved at his boss through the webcam and I went and got my tablet so I could look up the facts for the birds who were visiting me.

Some of them I couldn’t get good pictures of because there were so many of them. It was birds all over, on the steps up to the apartments across from us, and on top of Ms. Holloway’s car that she has a permit for because Nika uses a wheelchair, and a whole crowd on the grass in the middle and everywhere!

The ones whose names I could find were all star-birds. Every single one! Except they kept moving around a lot so maybe I missed a lot of them that weren’t. Most of them were in the section of the app on birds that can’t fly at all, which I didn’t know there were so many! And then my dad realized I was late for video school and he made me close my bird app and log on.

***

Now we are many. Now we are no longer lonely. Do the ground-dwellers know what we are becoming? They send fighter jets after us that scream through the sky like they are about to die and are so, so frightened of the end of the world.

Instead of an end, we offer them a beginning. The jets become swans, and the pilots also become swans. The bullets from their powerful guns take flight and become cliff swallows and storm petrels and Carolina parakeets.

We whistle and screech and sing a laughing racket like every sound at once. We are all one flock, tumbling through the sky like nothing at all can hurt us.

***

Avie

In school the kids in my class were talking about how the airplanes disappeared and no one knows why or how or if they’ll ever come back. Austen was crying and Deshawn told her she wasn’t allowed to cry because it was his cousins who disappeared off a plane, not hers, and then T’resa said she thought it would be fun to be a bird, and then Austen screamed at her to shut up and that it wasn’t true that anyone turned into a bird because that was impossible. Then our teacher muted us all and said he was turning school off for the day.

My dad was still working and I’m not supposed to interrupt him even if I’m lonely because he has to work hard so some day we can move out of refugee housing and I can have a bedroom. I wanted to ask him whether people could turn into birds and it made me mad that I couldn’t! I know Austen was really mad about it and so was Deshawn even if he didn’t scream at anyone, and I didn’t say so because Austen was crying, but I’m like T’resa. Birds have more friends than just video school friends that get turned off when your teacher is mad that someone yelled! Birds have flocks which means they have friends all the time.

I went outside and waved to all the pretty birds perched on the roof of our apartment building—they had such pretty tails, like black and white arrows and swooping green ribbons. I’m sure they were star-birds, even if I didn’t know their names because I didn’t have my tablet with me. They didn’t wave back but they bobbed their heads and whistled hello, and that made me feel a little better.

I practiced jumping down the stairs for a little while, to see what might happen. I was going to try to climb up the railing and jump off there, to see if that would be high enough to turn into a bird, but Nika’s mom stuck her head out the window and said I couldn’t.

***

By the time the ground-dwellers and their metals stop flying altogether we are hundreds of hundreds of millions. We are an ocean of wings beneath the bright sun. We encircle the world like the water-ocean and our wings outmatch the cold, wet waves.

With the sky closed to them, the ground-dwellers live slower. So many are angry about reaching the limits of their power, but each bullet they fire only increases our numbers.

Those who are not angry are quieter. Some of them come to us, and we beauty them, gently. We invite them to sing.

***

Avie

This morning the pretty gray and gold-pink birds outside my window didn’t fly away even when I put my hand on the glass. I like them. They’re nice.

I told my dad I was going outside to play and he said I could go by myself if I promised to stay in the courtyard because he was busy working and Nika and her mom were outside. Even though Nika’s a lot older than me she still plays with me sometimes, but her mom said not today because they were going to the doctor to check on Nika’s lungs, which got smoke inhalation during the fire that got their house.

Even though I promised my dad I would stay in the courtyard, I went around the corner and down the street and up the hill and climbed up the big rock at the top of the hill where I like to sit sometimes because you can see the tops of the roofs of the buildings where all us wildfire refugees live. I thought about practicing jumping off the rock, but I didn’t.

I felt kind of sad and mad and it was cloudy like a sore throat. Like there was a wildfire burning far away but still close enough to smell the ash from all the dead trees and dead squirrels and dead deer and dead moms that got all burned up in their cars. But then I heard birds singing, the soft sound of the gray-gold-pink birds my app says are passenger pigeons even though that’s impossible because they’re extinct. I looked around and saw birds landing in the bushes, in the trees all around me, in the grass. A pigeon landed on the rock beside my foot and cocked her head at me. Her eyes were black with a pink ring on the edges like she’d been crying, and it made me feel better to know someone else felt the way I do.

There were other kinds of birds in the flock, some small brown seagulls and herons with long legs like the chopsticks in takeout teriyaki, and robins and blue jays and orioles, who aren’t star-birds, and a whole cluster of bright beautiful extinct hummingbirds that swooped and darted and then hovered all in the air above me.

At a signal I couldn’t hear, the flock launched themselves back into the sky. Their wings blew the hair back from my face and I knew they wanted me to fly up into the sky with them. I couldn’t hear the signal to go, but in a way, I could hear it. I could feel it in my body lifting me up. But I didn’t know how to do it.

The pigeon and the hummingbirds were still there and they looked at me and I looked at them and then down at my hands and my arms which were turning iridescent green-black like a hummingbird and then I thought, maybe my mom could be like a star-bird, like a hummingbird, completely dead but then not dead at all, and when I jumped off the rock I spread my wings.

2548 words

Joanne Rixon lives in the shadow of an active volcano with a rescue chihuahua named after a dinosaur. They are a member of STEW and the Dreamcrashers, and are an organizer with the North Seattle Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup. Their poetry has appeared in GlitterShip, their book reviews in the Seattle Times and the Cascadia Subduction Zone Literary Quarterly, and their short speculative fiction in venues including Terraform, Fireside, and Lady’s Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Joanne Rixon’s fiction has previous appeared in Diabolical Plots, with “The Cliff of Hands”. If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.