ASIM_issue_54 (16 page)

People crossed themselves when a fox crossed their path, or muttered old prayers. Despite everything, despite knowing it was genetic, people were still superstitious. Pregnant women avoided the forest, drank hot potions if they’d even seen a fox, let alone touched one. Waiting in the antenatal clinic, Kate had overheard other mothers-to-be sharing stories about a woman they knew, or had heard about. The woman had been bitten by a fox one night, by the bins outside her house, and though she’d done
everything they said
, her child had come out furred, clawing its way down the birth canal before being been taken away.

“We’ve set traps all round the house,” one woman said, and the others nodded at the wisdom of such measures.

“I’ve heard you can get wolfsbane tablets from that Chinese herbalist up on Market Street,” said another.

“Aren’t they poisonous?”

The woman shrugged, rubbed her hand over her belly. “This is my third. I took wolfsbane tablets every day for the first two.”

“I heard they make you miscarry.”

“Only if there’s something wrong with it anyway.”

“I’ve heard that if you suspend a fox’s tooth on a string over your belly, it will swing back and forth if your baby’s normal, but spin in a circle if it’s a fox.”

One woman leaned forward, dropped her voice. “D’you remember Simone? That woman with the toddler?”

“Haven’t seen her in a while.”

“She’s gone,” said the woman. “Found out it was a fox she was carrying and ran. Her husband’s furious: says he didn’t even know she was a carrier.”

“Run?” Kate said, and the circle opened, leaned back and eyed her suspiciously.

“Gone feral. Run back to her kind to whelp her kit in a den in the forest.”

“I heard she gave birth in one of those underground shelters and then released the pup into the wild.”

“How would you be,” said a young woman, aghast. “Knowing it was out there, a … child of yours, one of them.”

The women shook their heads, rubbed their bellies and crossed themselves.

“Takes all kinds,” said one, and the others nodded.

Kate shook the memory away and placed her shoes side by side at the edge of the mown lawn, alongside the ziplocked bag filled with packets of tablets she’d bought out from the kitchen, and the pregnancy test—two blue lines on a white plastic stick. He’d know what it meant, her husband. He would have heard stories about others—people like her—who’d gone back to the old ways. Given up on the therapy for one reason or another: for love, out of anger or grief, or just because no matter how well the drug therapies worked they couldn’t take away the longing she still felt to be low and wild and free. Perhaps it was harder for people like her—the ones who’d been caught and taken away from their dams when they were just pups—but who still remembered what it was like to be curled up in a litter of fur and musk and leaf-rot. To run naked in the woods and smell the rain.

Perhaps, after she’d been gone a while, he’d find a new wife. Not someone like her—but another kind of woman, one who wasn’t genetically compromised. Someone he could feel safe with. Probably when he was young it had seemed exciting, part of his youthful rebellion, to date someone like her. To love her and marry her. But he had changed, and so had she. When he didn’t get that promotion, when the others didn’t invite them for barbecues and tennis games, she knew he wondered if it was because of her. And if he didn’t say so now, it was only a matter of time before he would. Before he looked at her long, rusty hair that crackled and snapped when he ran his hands through it, almost alive, and wondered aloud if she shouldn’t dye it, or cut it short, try a little harder to fit in.

She tossed her hair down her bare back, felt the warmth of it against her skin and heard a fox howl, somewhere close. She stepped onto the path. For a moment, she felt the tug of both worlds, both futures, pulling at her. The house at her back with its bricks and glass and clean, white sheets. Her husband sleeping. Her daughter, too, curled up in bed, her milky skin flushed with dreams. And the forest ahead of her. The darkness of it, the earth and mud and dampness, the rising sap and the cold wind. The blood and bone beneath it, running in the shadows. The hunters with their guns.

For a moment, she felt the fear overwhelm her, saw again what she had long told herself was not really a memory: her mother’s body a smear of fur and blood on the grass. The hunter marking his own face with her blood—one line of it on each of his cheeks—and then wiping the knife clean on his pants before he hauled her and her sisters out of hiding and bundled them into a sack. Her brothers he staked to the trunk of the tree and left to rot because, so they said, males were harder to turn back once they were more than a few hours old. (Though Dr Roberts had said—when tests had shown at least one of the children she had carried was a boy—that this was a lie. “The males go feral during puberty,” she had said, crying. “I heard they attack their mothers, their fathers. That they turn into animals.” Dr Roberts had leaned forward, his tired eyes searching hers for something she feared he might find. “They say a lot of things that aren’t true,” he said.)

She was only a little way down the path when she saw a fox in the dark: just its eyes, gleaming at her through the leaves. And then another. A low humming sound—not howling, but singing. A welcoming, earthy song. A rustling nearby, the stink of home. A press of hot fur as one of them twined around her feet before it darted away. Her belly tightened; she could feel its pulse urging her to run. Her heart was beating fast and she could smell the rain coming. A long way off, but coming. If she stayed, the children she bore … Her daughters. Her sonse …

She shook herself free of the thoughts that crowded in and began to run. Bare feet on bare earth. She could hear them, feel them, running beside her. Their hot breath, their low, rustling speed. It was as if they had been waiting. As if they had known she would come. They bounded onto the path ahead of her—first one and then another and another—a stream of fur into which she flowed. She ran, and ran. Everything loose and long and low and true. Something let go inside her and began to fall.

It was falling still.

…M Darusha Wehm

“Good morning, Marian.” Her alarm clock’s voice was soft and androgynously sensual. “You have three new messages,” it continued as she slowly woke. “The bank would like to offer you several investment choices for the busy professional, the government has ten tips to help you quit smoking and your mother wants you to call her.” She lay in bed, sunlight angling through the space between her curtains, the clock yakking away on the nightstand, but she ignored it all. She was thinking of him.

It had only been going on for a couple of weeks, but she could barely remember a time before him. He really was the first thing she thought of when she woke and the last thought on her mind before falling asleep. He consumed her; she breathed his breath. Just thinking his name could make her completely lose track of time. Graeme. Spelled with
E
s, not like Gray-ham. Somehow more dignified that way, she thought. Graeme.

She could hear her alarm at the corner of her mind, but she was overwhelmed by her excitement at the thought of seeing him so soon. She felt like a teenager with a wicked crush, but it was so much more than that. She was a grown woman, he was a man, and this was no schoolyard infatuation. No, this was the real thing.

She sighed, and whispered his name. Graeme.

* * *

Marian didn’t remember the first time she’d met Graeme, and that drove her crazy. He worked at a coffee shop, the one she visited most afternoons after work on her way home, and that was how she knew him. But she couldn’t remember if he was already working there when she first walked in, looking for a latte and a quiet half hour, or if he started sometime after she’d become a regular. She didn’t even remember the first time she noticed how beautiful he was, standing behind the bar, frothing milk or serving up sandwiches, his coffee coloured skin set off against the creamy white of the ceramic mugs. It was like one day he was just another service worker that you hardly even notice, then the next day he was the centre of her life.

Obviously, it wasn’t that sudden. She’d noticed him at some point, in that way you realize someone is attractive, and wonder how you could possibly have ever missed it before. And it had just gone from there. She wasn’t exactly sure how it had begun, but one day she’d walked behind the red-haired barista with the tattoos, who was checking the online staff schedule. Marian had just happened to glimpse the site’s URL over the redhead’s shoulder, and her next move had suddenly seemed obvious. She’d hit up the site on her phone, and paging back a few days plus a little deduction yielded his name. Graeme Blake. Graeme. She just happened to copy his next month’s schedule to her phone. It was almost like public information, anyway, on such a poorly encrypted site as that.

She waited a full week before following him home after his shift. She left the coffee shop before he did, not wanting to draw attention to herself. She walked to the 7-11 on the corner, and bought a pack of cigarettes. She didn’t even bother using cash to avoid the annoying public health warning emails she’d get by using her bankcard. She could see into the window of the coffee shop from the counter at the Sev, and watched as he—as Graeme—cleaned up the coffee bar and tidied the tables.

She was lighting up her first outside on the curb as he came out of the cafe and locked the doors. The sun was setting as he started walking toward downtown. Marian waited until he was a half block ahead before she got going. She glanced at the CCTV camera on the corner and told herself that it was the way she walked home every day anyway. So what if she was a couple of hours later than usual. And why would the cops be watching her? She had never done anything wrong.

It wasn’t a long walk, maybe twenty minutes, but it felt timeless to Marian. Watching him, the way his beat-up old messenger bag—the one he always hung on the coat rack at the coffee shop—bounced on his backside. The motion was almost mesmerizing, and Marian had to check herself to make sure she stopped for the red lights. She was stopped at a corner watching, while he walked into a shabby walkup. His place.

She sat on the bench at the bus stop across the street from his apartment. On the bus stop’s wall, a public service announcement reminded her that terrorists are neighbours, too, and exhorted her to report any suspicious activity to the local police. She wouldn’t have noticed if a rebel militia marched by, so transfixed was she by his window.

She barely moved, except to light cigarette after cigarette. She watched the light and shadows playing on the other side of his window, wondering if he noticed the glow of her cigarettes in the dark.

By the time the third number eight bus had gone by, and no one else had entered the apartment, she decided that he must live alone. The thought both thrilled and saddened her. A man like that shouldn’t have to be on his own. She made a note of the address of his apartment complex on her phone. She got on the next bus, and rode the dozen blocks back to her neighbourhood, fantasizing about what might someday happen on the other side of his apartment’s window.

* * *

She eventually silenced the alarm’s chirping and got out of bed. She showered, dressed, and was out the door in a half hour, walking a few blocks down the street to the little diner on the corner. She’d never been there in the morning before, but she knew they served pastries and coffee, and more importantly, had a window on to the street. She hoped she was early enough to get a booth.

She walked through the diner’s door, almost unconsciously glancing up at its security camera. Not the obvious one with the blinking red light above the door. She looked for the tiny fisheye lens over the counter that scanned the entire room. She knew it was there, because she’d been in the restaurant only a week before for a routine service call on the camera.

The AI chip had started identifying perfectly ordinary customers as possible terrorists, and after the fifth set of cops showed up with nothing to do, the diner called Panoptitech, Marian’s employer, to fix it. Marian was assigned to the job and she’d had the upgrade installed between lunch and afternoon break. That was when she noticed the window and the proximity to the street corner, and she decided to come back some morning before work.

She tried not to look at the hidden camera while she ordered a coffee and a bagel, paying with a wave of her bankcard over the store’s reader. The whole transaction took about a minute. She walked over to the booths with her plate and cup and was pleased to see an empty seat by the window, a perfect vantage point to watch the crosswalk. She sipped her coffee and waited.

Nibbling her bagel, she glanced at the clock on her phone, and exactly at 7:26 a.m. she saw him crossing the street, his tired old book bag slung over one shoulder. She wondered if it was too soon in their relationship to buy him a gift? She didn’t think so. Marian had never believed in things like fate before, but it was hard not to think in those terms now. It was so obvious that he was meant for her; there were just too many happy coincidences conspiring to bring them together—her apartment so close to the university where he was studying, this diner she’d only just found with its perfect view of his walk to class in the morning.

She had noticed him reading a textbook on cosmology at the cafe, and when he was in the washroom she casually wandered past and looked at his notes. His notebook was covered in the logos of the university, and she saw a page from a class syllabus sticking out the back cover. An hour on the university’s website confirmed that he was a grad student in the physics department, and his class schedule was easy enough to infer after another hour of studying the department’s website.

She smiled over her coffee cup as she watched him walk to campus. She hadn’t had the patience for school; as a result, she never got the grades for university, but she’d always liked science. Her occasional smoking buddy at work, Susan, was an engineer; Marian liked to hear her talk about the new, cool things she was working on. She imagined nights in Graeme’s apartment, listening to him explain some complex theory to her.