Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [24]
All workers were clear of the beast now, except for the dead, the injured, and two laden stretcher-teams splashing up the plan through the shallows. The lightning storm flickered and played in the head, now in fine, clear webs at the surface, now deeper and vaguer.
The beast lifted its upper limb, a giant unsteady thing with three clasping digits at the end, from its far side to its head. It felt, with delicate clumsiness, the bald skin above the ear, the angled dish of the skull top.
One of the digits slipped into the cavity, dislodging a single globe there, and whatever tension had held the cells in position was broken. The head-contents collapsed like a fruit-stack from a market-stall. Many rolled right out of the skull, onto the plan.
The beast tried to paw the spilt cells back into its skull. Some it retrieved; others it knocked farther away, and they sat grey and lightless on the plan. Like a flirty old drunk man fumbling for his fancy Western hat, it groped for its skull-dish. It clamped it back onto its head—but crookedly. Several cells were crushed. Their contents burst out; the black barbells cringed and withered; the oils spread upon the seawater; the rest of the filling lay jellied against the casing.
Holding its head together, the beast used a great contraction of its as-yet-uncut abdomen to curve itself up, to roll itself onto its single foot.
Oh my, I thought. It could be mistaken for a person, this one. Like what you see of a person sidling in through a nearly-closed door.
‘It can crush the whole town,’ said Trawbrij. ‘If it falls that way.’
The thing turned, from the sun to the land. There it stood, on its crooked hind-limb, loose pieces of gel sliding off it. How many houses high was it, how many hills? Its chest and limbs were patterned with rectangular excavations like a rock quarry; our last unfinished blanket of thigh flesh drooped, dripping. There was a neatly cut cavity where the sex had been, full of drips and runnels like a grotto in the hill caves. Its eye was still sealed, its mouth torn partly open. Brain-fluid and matter ran down either side of the grey-stopped nose, in the high sun.
My own head felt light and hollow. Good, was the only thought in it. My heart thumped hard, and burned red. Crush the whole town. And the plan, too, and everyone on it. Do that.
Three small, ornamental picture frames appeared in my mind, around three faces—Jumi’s, Dochi’s, Jupi’s—all looking downward, or to the side. Far overhead, guilt whipped at me as always, but it barely stung. I was deep in my insides; against my cheek and ear, some black inner organ, quite separate from my body’s functioning, turned and gleamed.
It’s only fair.
The beast managed, though one-legged, to take a kind of step. But it sagged towards the missing toe; it gripped and tried to hold itself upright with a toe that wasn’t there. Then the weakened knee gave, and the creature jerked and wobbled tremendously above us. And fell—of course it fell. But it fell away from us, stretching itself out across the farther plans.
And it lay still.
There were several moments of silence. Nothing moved but eyes.
Then there was an explosion around me, a fountain of striped shirts and shouting mouths, a surge forward.
I knew what they meant; I myself was hot-bowelled and shaking with relief. But I didn’t surge or shout or leap; I couldn’t quite believe. So vast a creature and so strange, and yet the life in it was one-moment-there, next-moment-gone, just as for a dog under a bus-wheel, or a chicken that a jumi pulls the neck of. And the world adjusts around it like water; as soon as the fear is gone, as soon as the danger is passed, normalness slips in on all sides, to cover up that any life was ever there.
The plan-workers rushed in. People came exclaiming into the yards from the town—those who had not seen had certainly heard, had felt the ground jump as the beast collapsed. Women and children crowded at the plan gates, and some of the little boys were allowed to run in, because they were not bad luck like the girls