Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [25]
Lots of people—and I was one of these—felt we had to approach the beast, and touch it. Lots of us felt compelled to walk its length and see its motionlessness end to end for ourselves, see its dead face.
‘Oh, oh,’ I said, to no one, as I walked, as I stroked the skin. ‘All my Jupi’s careful work.’
All the plans from 16 to 13 were cracked clean through. The beast had crushed plan 13’s steamer-shed to splinters, its trypots to copper pancakes; it had filled plan 12’s hair house to the rafters with brain-spheres—dead spheres, grey-purplish spheres, spheres that held nothing unexpected.
The stretcher-men went to and fro with their serious faces, bearing their serious loads. The bosses withdrew; theirs was the most urgent work. The rest of us could do nothing until they had bargained our jobs back into being, weighed up the damage and set it against the value of the beast and parcelled everything out appropriately. Yet we couldn’t leave, could only wander dazed, and examine, and exclaim.
Finally they made us go, because some of the day-jobbers were found snipping pieces of hair, or taking chunks of eyeball or somesuch, and they put ribbons and guards all around the beast and brought the soldiers in to clear the plans and keep them clear.
So Jupi and Dochi and I, we walked, still all wobbly, back to our uncrushed home. There was Jumi, waiting to be told, and Jupi described how he had seen it, and Dochi how it had looked from his position up on the forelimb, and I told her yes, between them that was pretty much how it had seemed to me. There was too much to say, and yet none of it would tell properly what had happened, even to people who’d been there too.
Still people tried and tried. They came and went—we came and went ourselves—and everyone kept trying.
‘How would it be!’ said Mavourn.
We were all in the beer-shanty by then. I looked down at the thin foam on the beer he had bought me, and smelled the smell, and thought how I didn’t want ever to like drinking beer.
‘How would it be,’ he said, ‘to be a beast, to wake up and find yourself chopped half to pieces, and not in the ether any more, and with no fellow beast to hear your cry?’
‘No one can know that, Mavourn,’ said Jupi. ‘No one can know how a beast thinks, what a beast feels.’
I looked around the table. My colleagues shook their heads, muzzily some of them, with the beer. Some were my family—there was Jupi here, and two distant cousins across from me. I had wanted them all crushed, a few hours ago; what on earth made me want that, in the moment when the beast wavered, and the future was not set?
I could not say. That moment had gone, and the heat in my heart had gone with it. I picked up the beer. I closed my nose to the smell; I looked beyond the far rim so as not to see the slick on the surface from the unclean cup. And I sipped and swallowed, and I put the cup down, and I shook my head along with the other men.
{ Into the Clouds on High
‘Here.’ The screen door slapped closed on a gust of cold air. Dad swooshed a bundle of greenery onto the table. ‘Make something of that.’
‘What?’ Marcus was on the point of finishing his maths homework. He’d been looking forward to packing up and going to bed.
‘One of your neck-laces,’ said Dad, shutting the back door. ‘Though there’s no flowers to be had.’
Both of them looked at the gerberas in the vase on the table. They were a cheerful, shouty pink. ‘We can’t use those. They’re from Josie next door,’ said Marcus. ‘She visits just about every day. She’ll notice they’re gone.’
‘She’ll notice Mum’s gone a whole lot more.’
‘I suppose.’
The gerberas shouted some more.
‘Gotta be better than just green,’ said Dad.
‘They are nice and bright.’
Dad took the vase to the sink, pulled out the flowers and emptied the water into the plughole.
Marcus closed the maths book and pushed it away. He dragged the whippy green vine-stalks towards him. ‘Are you worried about her, then?’
Dad rinsed the gerbera stems hard under the tap, then wiped them with a tea-towel. Mum would have used the kitchen paper. But then,