Sparks (11 page)

"Okay," she said, scribbling through the check boxes and scrawling down her name and address. She scribbled down "Sparky Anderson" as the babies' father. For number of children, she put a question mark. She handed the electronic pad back to Audrey, who gave her the scanner.

"Go nuts," she said.

Behind her, Katie had torn the baby-bumper display apart and was sitting on the floor, surrounded by plastic-swathed calico. "Can you tell me how fire retardant your crib materials are?"

Audrey squatted beside Katie and began to prattle on about crib safety standards.

Anya pulled the trigger on the UPC gun. A red beam swept across the shelves, and the machine beeped when it grazed the price code for a crib mattress. Sparky chortled with glee.

Anya swept the beam across the floor. Sparky leapt down and raced after the laser, legs scrambling along the tile, tail kinked in excitement. She banked the laser against a low-hanging price tag when he pounced, resulting in a satisfying beep.

Sparky turned, wagged his tail:
More.

Anya skimmed the price gun up to the display of mobiles overhead.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Sparky scrambled up the displays and swatted at the mobiles. A cacophony of chimes tinkled overhead as he disrupted the electronic parts. A couple of the motorized ones spun lazily overhead. Sparky peered over the top shelf at her, tongue curling out of his mouth. Coyly, he ducked out of sight.

Anya grinned. It was on.

She sprinted down the aisle to the next, swung around the corner with the gun in a double-fisted grip. She saw the end of a salamander tail snaking out from a shelf, stealthily advanced upon it.

Turkey. He thought he was hiding, but hid about as well as an ostrich.

She reached up to tug it. A stuffed animal tumbled down to the floor: a plush dragon.

Behind her, Sparky squeaked. She spun, looking up. The salamander leapt from the crest of one aisle, overhead to the other. He landed in a swing perched on the top shelf. The mechanism whirred as it wound up, swinging him back and forth.

Anya aimed the laser at the swing beside it. Sparky scrambled out of the seat and lunged to the next. The next swing seat cranked to life, expelling the salamander to a high chair on the end cap display.

Sparky looked down on her, shaking his butt like a cat stalking a mouse.

Anya stuck her tongue out at him.

Sparky mirrored her. His amphibian tongue was much more impressive.

Anya aimed the gun at a nearby display of baby monitors. The machine beeped as she scanned it across a line of shelf stickers. Sparky pounced, flinging himself at the equipment. When he made contact, the demo models on the eye-level shelves squeaked and squawked in a terrible feedback loop. A woman towing a toddler and a cart in the main aisle covered the little boy's ears. When she saw smoke curling out of one of the speakers, she carefully took a box containing the same product out of her cart and abandoned it on the floor.

When Anya turned back, Sparky was gone. She searched through the aisles for him, dodging around carts and strollers. A flock of calico-clad women rushed to the malfunctioning mobiles and baby monitors, trying to shut them off. Anya glided past them, sweeping the laser beam in her path down the broad main aisle, hoping to tempt Sparky out of wherever he was hiding.

She heard hysterical quacking in the bath-toy aisle, sounding like a dog was mutilating a duck. She turned down the aisle to see the floor littered with plastic squids and rubber duckies. She stooped to pick up a duck. It was lavender, covered in glitter, with a charming sleepy expression on its face. She squeezed it, and the electronic squeaker inside quacked. Anya tucked it under her arm. It would make a fine addition to her bathroom rubber duck collection. Perhaps Sparky would wear the squeaker out of it.

Sparky's tail slithered around the corner, and Anya pursued him down an impossibly large aisle of diapers. The scanner hit price tags for organic cotton diapers, disposable infant diapers, training pants, toddler diapers... and amphibian feet slipped out from behind the shelves to smack at the ray.

A beleagured-looking man with circles under his eyes watched her in fascination. "How many kids do you have, anyway?"

Anya cleared her throat. "Uh... Several."

The man shook his head, hugged a jumbo-sized plastic package of diapers to his chest. "We have just one. Good luck."

Anya managed a weak smile and sidled off down the aisle in search of Sparky.

She found him in the educational-video section. He was perched in front of a television screen depicting a shifting kaleidoscope of colors, entranced. A recording of child giggles was the sound track. The two televisions beside him had short-circuited, emitting a burned-rubber smell. A clerk was busily trying to pry a fire extinguisher off the wall. Anya took pity on her, removed the fire extinguisher, and laid a nice layer of foam down over the shorted televisions. It was nearly as satisfying as frosting a cake.

Sparky didn't move. Anya set down the fire extinguisher, stood behind him with her arms crossed. A repetitive display of primary colors swirled, reflected in his eyes, and his gill-fronds twitched.

"I don't get it," she said.

Sparky trilled, not removing his eyes from the screen. His pupils had fully dilated, rendering his eyes black as obsidian. Anya wiped some chemical foam off the DVD display.
Baby Brilliance
promised to be educational, though Anya couldn't see a damn thing educational about swirling colors and the annoying background track of giggles. But it was quieter than both the mobile and the rubber duck.

She read from the back of the package: "'... nurtures and stimulates Baby's growing intellect.'" She raised an eyebrow at Sparky. "If I buy this for you, will you promise to raise your children to be rocket scientists who will support me in my old age?"

Sparky twittered, cocked his head as if he'd been lobotomized. Anya took that as an affirmative. But there was still something creepy about the way he was glued to the set. And Anya wasn't sure that was a good thing.

A half hour later, she and Katie pushed two shopping carts full of merchandise into the parking lot. The carts contained baby bumpers, a crib mattress, and sheets with a green pattern of geckos, temperature gadgets, a handful of rubber ducks, two DVDs, a crib mobile, and a large stuffed dragon--to keep the newts company when Sparky wasn't there. Behind them, a peculiar burning smell emanated from the store, and a siren could be heard in the distance. Perched on top of Anya's cart, Sparky rode on top of the packages like a pirate captain at the helm of his ship.

"That was fun," Anya said with sincerity. But she felt a pang of guilt at the destruction she and Sparky had visited upon the calico empire. She attempted to console herself with thoughts of insurance money payouts and the hundreds of dollars she'd just dropped at the register. It would even out, she told herself. Maybe.

Katie rolled her eyes and kept shoving her cart. "Yeah. I saw the total on your registry."

Anya waved at her a stack of washcloths embroidered with yellow fuzzy ducks and tied with a ribbon. "I got a free gift for signing up. And a shoe box full of registry cards to tell people to buy me shit. But I think Sparky was disappointed that they wouldn't let us keep the scanner."

"Yeah. For registering for five thousand dollars' worth of baby gear. Good job." Katie smirked. "Now you'll be on their mailing list forever."

"Shit," Anya said. "Though... maybe we can come back if they send some coupons."

"I still feel guilty leaving them unsupervised."

Anya paced the hallway, peered into the bathroom. Sparky was on his nest, purring. The nest was much more fussed over than she'd anticipated: The Gore-Tex sleeping bag was tucked over the eggs, and the crystalline coating on the bathtub had been surrounded by the green gecko-patterned bumper-and-mattress set. The green plush dragon was perched with its butt on the soap dish as a surrogate parent. Sparky had allowed Anya to move the eggs around in the tub: fifty-one baby salamanders soon to come into the world. Anya screwed her eyes shut and rubbed her temples at the thought.

Not knowing when they'd hatch, she'd stoppered the drain and wrapped the faucet shut with duct tape. She had a moment's neurotic nightmare of baby salamanders crawling down the drain. Dangling from the showerhead above, Sparky's mobile tinkled lazily. It turned off and on at odd intervals. But since it ran on batteries, Anya figured there was little danger of electrical fire.

She knelt to check the temperature on the rubber duck thermometer. It was designed to sound an alarm if the nest became warmer or cooler than bathwater. Pulling it from under Sparky's rump, she read the temperature at 88.6. She hoped when she took Sparky to work, she'd be able to maintain the temperature with the reptile heat packs.

Anya looked at Sparky, curled up in his nest. She swallowed. She knew Sparky would follow her wherever she went--he was tied to the collar. But she couldn't, in all good conscience, pull him away from the nest for prolonged lengths of time. Sparky's natural inclination was always to follow her, but...

Perhaps... perhaps she could leave him here alone. Images of her house burned to the foundation simmered to her mind's eye. She never left Sparky alone. What terrible things would happen if she did?

"Nice ass."

Anya turned to the video monitor perched on the countertop. Brian's voice issued through the speaker with a tinny echo. Her backside was facing the webcam, and she realized that she'd been giving Brian a less-than-flattering camera angle. Anya looked over her shoulder at the device. "Is it working, then?"

"C'mon out and see for yourself."

Anya patted Sparky's head and left the bathroom. He hadn't allowed anyone other than Anya to enter, and Anya had no idea what her makeshift salamander cradle would look like to the others. When Brian had been toasting the eggs with a hair dryer, he said he'd seen absolutely nothing but the crystal glaze on the interior of the bathtub. Before Katie had taken Ciro home, they'd managed to peek behind the door when Sparky had returned to his nest. Neither of them had seen anything, either. Anya was relieved the salamanders had inherited their father's invisibility.

In the living room, Brian had opened up the back of the other half of the monitor setup. Wires dangled from the back, connecting it to a laptop, a wireless router, and another hand-held device. Brian crooked a finger for Anya to come sit beside him on the couch. He flipped on the video monitor, aimed at the bathtub.

Anya's heart fell. The video feed didn't pick up anything. It just looked like a sleeping bag and some baby stuff crammed in a bathtub for wash day.

"Thanks for trying, Brian," she said. "But I didn't expect that-- Oh."

Suddenly, the video image switched to a red, yellow, and green display. Anya could see the outline of the tub in blue, and a red salamander curled over dozens of orange dots that glowed like coals.

"I modified the video feed to pick up data from the thermal imaging camera." Brian grinned. "Now you can see exactly where they are."

"This is great," Anya said. "Is there any way that the feed could be put online, so I could check this at work? Like a nanny cam?" She was certain that there were tons of paranoid parents who had poured money into the technology. Perhaps she could spy on the salamanders from a distance, too?

"I did you one better." Brian flipped out a shiny black iPhone. He punched a few buttons and handed it to her. "I have voice dialing set up. Say your familiar's name."

Anya leaned toward it and said, "Um... Call Sparky?"

The glossy black screen blinked to life. On the tiny screen, Anya could see the heat signatures of the salamander on his nest. Through the audio, she could hear the echo of Sparky snoring in the next room.

"Oh, wow," she breathed. "I can take this with me?"

"It'll work anywhere you can get a 3G signal. So... you should be able to see them anywhere in the metro area. Your signal might be disrupted if you're in an area that's got heavy concrete walls or is underground. Battery life's only about five hours, so recharge often, and remember to switch the battery pack."

Anya flung her arms around Brian's neck. "You're the greatest evil genius on the planet."

"That's why I get the big bucks. And all the hot chicks," he murmured against her throat.

Anya lay awake, thoughts churning. On the nightstand beside her bed, the thermal image showed Sparky cuddled up with his eggs. The portrait of Ishtar on the wall seemed to glance over her shoulder at the monitor, red light playing off the glitter of minerals trapped in the paint.

She dreaded making the decision to leave the salamanders tomorrow. Deep down, she knew Sparky needed to be with his eggs. But she felt some apprehension about taking the collar off and leaving him behind.

It didn't bother you to take the collar off last night,
Ishtar's accusing eye seemed to say to her.

Anya hugged the pillow that smelled like Brian to her chest. She felt guilty and giddy at once. But it seemed that she couldn't bare one part of her soul without neglecting the other. And if she was truly honest with herself, she also felt guilty for the simple feeling of joy. She didn't deserve it. In all that stew, a twinge of fear brightened: the fear of loss, of losing everything as surely as she'd lost everything as a child.

Anya snatched the pillow and the comforter from the bed. Wrapping it around her shoulders like a cape, she crossed the hall to the bathroom. A night-light in the shape of a yellow duck illuminated Sparky, curled in a ball with his tail tickling his gill-fronds.

He opened one eye when Anya arranged the pillow and comforter on the floor beside the bathtub. He seemed adorably peaceful now, but Anya wondered what would happen if... when... she left him alone. Would he get bored and chew the circuit breakers?

Worry and fears dogged her until she finally began to doze. The ceiling churned with the amber glow reflected from Sparky's body and irregular pulses of light from the eggs. Anya wondered if the pulses of light were their heartbeats as the little newts churned in their marble prisons. It was very much like falling asleep on the floor next to a Christmas tree: Sparky beside her, waiting for the house to burn down.