Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [52]
As if she’d read my thoughts, she challenged me. “You want to arm wrestle?”
I shook my head.
“It probably weighs more than a hundred pounds, y’know.” She flexed her biceps. “We’ll lug it down together.”
We climbed up on chairs on opposite sides of the table and took hold of the elk’s gritty antlers. I saw dead flies collected in the dip above its hairy neck. Mandarin said, “One, two, three!” and we tugged the thing from the wall.
She’d been right: it was heavy. And now that we were holding it, we didn’t have anywhere to put it.
“Crap,” I said. “Now what?”
“Unless we can jump together, we’ve just got to throw it.”
My arms burned. “Let’s put it back up for a second.”
“No! No way. I’m going to throw it. Here goes.…”
The elk head crashed into the ground face-first. One antler knocked against a table. An empty water glass toppled over, rolled off the table, and shattered on the wood floor. We froze only a moment before we leaped down and grabbed hold of the elk’s antlers.
Once we were safe in the truck, the elk head piled in with the others, Mandarin began to giggle. Her laughter slowly built until she was nearly hysterical.
“What?” I demanded.
“ ‘What’ is right.” She was driving fast, too fast, but I didn’t want to say anything. “As in, now what?”
I stared at her. Then I started to laugh too.
“You didn’t plan any further than that, did you?”
I shook my head.
“What are we going to do?” she said. “Reattach them to their bodies?”
“And then sprinkle them with fairy dust, and charm them back to life.” I paused. “Where are their bodies, do you think?”
“Skinned and eaten. If they were lucky. ’Cause at least they were useful that way. Died for a purpose, even a selfish one. But a lot of ’em probably were left to rot in some empty plain. Buried by the wind.”
I imagined the elk’s headless body lying out in the badlands, nothing left but old bleached bones, maybe scraps of fur, the dust blown up against it.
“How lonely,” I said.
“Burial’s always lonely.” Mandarin looked troubled for a second, her thoughts moving through the dark.
“What about the people in Pompeii?”
“What’s Pompeii?”
“That ancient city in Italy.” I grabbed for my nonexistent seat belt as the truck sped faster. “A volcano erupted and buried the town and everybody in it in ash. Then the ash turned to stone. When their bodies decayed, it preserved the shapes. So archaeologists could see exactly how the people died. Some were embracing.”
“Maybe they were angry old couples. Stuck together, with nowhere to go.”
I shook my head. “You’d have to love someone a whole lot to die like that.”
“Still, I wouldn’t want to be buried.” She kept accelerating, even though we were heading downhill. “Or burned.”
“Then what? Be, like, frozen in one of those time capsule things?”
I tried not to shriek as Mandarin slammed on the brakes. We had reached the bridge. She sat silently for a moment, engine still sputtering, headlights fading into the darkness of the river below.
“I’d want to float away,” she said.
My back strained as we heaved our second-to-last trophy—the elk head—off the bridge. Splash. It dipped below the surface, then bobbed up again. Unlike the other trophies we’d hurled into the river, it floated.
We watched it drift into the middle of the water. The slow-moving current brought it against a clump of sticks, and it slowly swiveled around until it was looking back at us. Its milky glass eyes glowed in the moonlight. It reminded me of one of those fairy river horses, kelpies, the ones who dragged people underwater and ate them.
With a crack, the sticks shifted. The elk head floated into the tunnel of river trees, around the bend, and was gone.
The wind picked up, sending pebbles clattering across the bridge. I was starting to get this weird, haunted feeling, the same way I felt in the badlands when I lost track of time and it started to grow dark. Thoughts of ravenous kelpies and corpses turning to hill dust didn’t help.