The car stopped with a wet squelch six minutes away from the docks, no house in sight.
“There he is,” said Curtis, pointing with a quick jut of his chin.
“Sorry?” The third thing Sue had said to him after ‘hello’ and ‘sure, let me get my bag,’ and it was an apology. Overconfidence was an unattractive thing in a student, but neither was anxiety. Oh well, too late now. One word too late now. One word and a flight and a ferry and a three minute car ride too late now.
Then part of the marsh raised itself higher to look at them through the drizzle, chewing, and like a reflex she started a checklist like she was looking through a reference book again the night before an exam.
Long, shaggy coat of feathers. Broad, thick bill. Short, monoclawed front limbs, useless for flight. Consumption of both water and land plants. Six feet tall at the shoulder. Either the shorewalker wren or Nicollette’s wren. The pale nictating membrane fluttering over his eyes as he watched them suggested Nicollette’s wren. Anyways, the shorewalker wren was extinct.
The membrane slid away clean again, white peeling off the deep-red like bone from muscles. The beak never stopped moving, internal shearing structures slicing up cellulose and fiber with an efficiency a blender manufacturer would weep at.
“Can we get out? My camera is waterproof.”
“You don’t want to. It’s four pm.”
“Oh?”
Curtis took his foot off the brakes by way of answering. The car lurched onwards with a little spittle of gravel, tiny splashes landing in the puddles on the road.
Sue turned in her seat to watch the last living Nicollette’s wren until they went around a bend. He didn’t return the favour, already face-deep in a fresh shrub.
***
The apartment was small and cramped and felt damper than the air outside somehow, but the couch was the kind where the lumps didn’t prevent it from being soft and there were reams of notes, volumes of notes, binders of notes, and she was on the same island as the last living Nicollette’s wren, and all of those things combined made up for the fact that Curtis still hadn’t spoken more words to her in person than he’d written in their three preliminary emails, two of which were single-sentence confirmations of time and date.
Still, some people were like that, and the sort of person who’d spend thirty years studying the same animal – the same INDIVIDUAL animal – was probably the most like that of all. Just a hermit, that’s all, a hermit alone in his cave with his notebooks and his journals and an apparently endless supply of cheap oversteeped tea.
“You need it during winter,” he told her as she sorted through her sixth bookcase. “Can’t keep out the damp, but it’ll do for the chill.”
“Thanks.”
A grunt.
The mention of the damp reminds her of something she noticed in the first few volumes, the oldest and most yellowed collections. “Have you digitized this?”
“Not worth the trouble. If you want to, more power to you.”
“I mean, I can definitely start making a dent in the oldest stuff and I don’t mind long hours, but with the timeline we’ve got I don’t know if I can get it all and keep the fieldwork going at the same-”
He laughed at that, and it almost made her flinch – it was humorless, but entirely unaffected and unplanned for, an involuntary cough created by a tickle of bleakness in the lungs. “Oh, it’ll be easy, you’ll see. Dead easy. Do the first journal and you won’t need to do the rest.” He dropped his mug in the sink with unnecessary and unnoticed force, and left for the bedroom without bothering to raise his voice or speak over his shoulder. “Hell, do the first journal and you won’t need the fieldwork. You’ll see.”
Sue sat there, one hand clutching a cheap notebook older than she was. The cover was loose. The ink was faded. It was still legible
So in lieu of thinking she got out her laptop and started typing.
Five minutes later, in lieu of pretending to be useful she fell asleep on the couch.
***
Curtis drove her out in the morning after a breakfast of granola bars (hers) and resteeped tea (his), parking the car on the elbow of the road.
“Here you are,” he said. The wipers were waving like little signal flags, powerless against the fog smearing the windshield into illegibility from the inside out.
“You’re not coming?”
“Don’t need to.”
“Is there anything I need to know?”
“You know not to get under its feet, right?”
Of the two things most people who’d heard of Nicollette’s wren knew about them, the (admittedly spectacular) outcome of what Dr. Vanard had termed the ‘trample reflex’ was probably one of them. “Yes.”
“Good. See you in the evening. It’s in the grove over there. Town’s back that-away if you need beer.”
The door slammed. The car groaned. The tires gave Sue a light shower. And, with the realization that she had never been given a phone number, she was alone.
Well. Not quite. Crunching came from the trees, distant and with woodier undertones than the gravel under her shoes. Twigs snapped under feet the size of snowshoes.
She ran. Then she walked. Then she snuck. Then, at last, she stopped and stared.
The last living Nicollette’s wren stood waist-deep in the understory, eating like a patient man submerged in an all-you-can-eat buffet. Snip, snip, snap goes the beak; chop chop crunch goes the mouth; gulp, and on to the next-best mouthful that you’ve spotted while you were busy with the last one.
Sue put her fist in her mouth and screamed a little inside her head, teeth in her knuckles keeping her respectably quiet. Something must have leaked anyways; the wren turned his head and looked directly at her.
She didn’t hold her breath, but that was because she spontaneously hiccupped instead.
His gaze held hers, then slid from her to the next branch. His mouth opened, his mouth shut. Crunch.
Sue sighed. Humans had lived on the island for centuries. The wren had been watched by surreptitious biologists in the bushes for years even before Curtis Brock had begun his career. She was probably making him as anxious as atmospheric oxygen, or leaves on greens, or (she twitched and slapped at her neck) mosquitos.
Not that he ever had much occasion to care about mosquitos, with a coat like that. Thick feather-shag-rug, shedding water off his back and down to the forest floor, presenting a stout barrier to heat, cold, and
Slap. “Fuck!”
biting insects.
No bites from anything else besides humans, though. The biggest predators on the islands before the first ships had been monitor lizards, the biggest of which were extinct now, and even at their largest they’d almost certainly never have risked tangling with an adult, preferring instead to make off with juveniles, hatchlings, and eggs.
Then had come humans, with rats and dogs and pigs. Now there were barely any monitors. No more juveniles, no more hatchlings. No more eggs.
In the extensive historical literature covering Nicollette’s wren was a lengthy letter by a mayor describing the taste of their eggs. “Disappointingly mediocre, despite their prodigious size,” apparently. Sue had been overcome by the desire to punch that long-dead correspondent at the time. Sometimes that urge resurfaced, like right now, watching the shaggy bison of an animal crunch his way through the thicket as serene and untroubled as a newly-crowned prince. It made the fresh red tooth-chewed dents on her knuckles itch.
Another crunch, a crack, and then he was up and moving, legs too big to be real for the small noise he made, drifting through the trees at a speed that left her half-jogging to keep up, stopping and starting as he did to inspect overturned logs for moss, to crunch up a delicious succulent, to sniff at an abandoned rat’s nest. She followed him deeper into the thickets, where she nearly lost a boot to a truculent boglet (part of the marsh she’d seen him wallowing in that first evening, if she was any judge); she followed him into the light open air of a fallowed field (nobody was there to ask permission, which she felt guilty about until she remembered the sum total of advice Curtis had given her) and saw him prowl and poke among the weeds for still-soft young prickle-stemmed plants; she followed him until the woods grew thick again and then dropped away and she almost ran into him, bent double at the edge of a deep, fern-ringed pool.
The noise he made as he drank was indescribable. Sue tried anyways, for her notes. ‘Drunken cat purring through a tuba and its own saliva’ was her third draft before she gave up and moved on to more important matters, like things she’d actually been trained to do.
Environmental observations. Well, she’d found his favorite watering hole; even through the steady flow of what must have been a half-week of solid drizzle over the muddy water’s edge, she saw more gigantic, deep, three-toed footprints than just this visit alone could have left. The wren was a regular here. The foliage at the water’s edge was surprisingly sparse, as if regularly pruned by someone with a pair of giant shears, possibly attached to their face. And if the small splash she just heard meant anything, there was a healthy population of local fish, which.
Splik, splik, splik splik-splik-splash.
“That’s how you do it!”
“Showoff.”
“Loser.”
Oh. If that small SERIES of splashes she just heard meant anything, this was where some of the local kids came to skip rocks. Something the wren seemed as implacable about as he was her own presence. She wondered how many of the two-or-three-ish vaguely adolescent blobs had parents who’d grown up doing just this, or grandparents. She wondered who the last person in town had been who’d known a world where for absolute certain there was more than one Nicollette’s wren, and then she wondered if she had something more useful and less depressing to think about, and by then the wren had turned himself about, head tucked back into his neck tucked back into his great hummock of a back tucked into a giant shaggy ball, and had begun to snore with great and majestic sonorousness.
She watched him until the sun went down, then walked in increasingly large circles tripping over things until she saw headlights. Curtis was waiting for her.
“How’d you know where to find me?” she asked.
“Easy,” he told her. He popped the car out of park before she had a chance to put her seatbelt on. “Read the first journal.”
***
Sue was too busy trying and failing to find a way to reformat her notes to get around to the first journal that evening. Curtis drank three mugs of tea for dinner, two teabags a mug, then went to bed without saying a word. She fell asleep on her notes and woke up feeling worse than he did, although probably not looking it. Breakfast was twice as many granola bars as yesterday, plus some oversteeped tea she made herself while Curtis nursed his own mug and stared out the smeared window at the rain.
“See you later if you aren’t back early,” he said as she left the car.
“Why would I come back early?” she asked, but he was already gone and her boots were already filling with water so she dismissed it and trudged from where he’d dropped her, back into the grove.
This time Sue was a little less nervous and she felt she got more done. Canvassed the plants of the grove thoroughly (with samples, in case she got her field IDs wrong), got some good footage of the wren eating, was less bothered by the mosquitos. She even got a little closer, cursing herself for being an excitable idiot as she did. Close enough to see the wear and chips and stains on his bill, to see the old scars on his right leg. She watched the limb flex and turn as he walked, followed him as he departed – into the deep thicket, then the fields, beelining once again for the pond. She did inventory on the pond vegetation too. Took note of what had been eaten, what hadn’t been eaten, what had been eaten only a little, took samples. It all kept her busy until the sun went down again, though this time she didn’t get as lost finding the car headlights.
“Sorry,” she said as she got back into the car. “Lost track of time – so much to do.”
“I’m telling you that you wouldn’t have to worry about it,” said Curtis, “if you read the first journal.”
Which she was going to do, of course. Just maybe tomorrow night. She had a LOT of samples to sort.
***
Day three Sue finished the last of her granola bars for what she was starting to realize was the only meal she’d been letting herself have, went into the field, and worked ahead a little – half an eye on the wren, half an eye on where he was going, hoping and hoping and hoping she was smart enough to notice if he got up and started on his daily routine before he walked on top of her and set off the trample reflex by mistake. She set up some trail cams on the paths he had beaten through the foliage, made a start on a survey of the vegetation of the fields and the thickets, left a final camera up a tree at the pond where the kids wouldn’t see it, and was still in time to catch his commute down to the water hole.
“I think I’ve got the basics set up now,” she said to Curtis that evening.
He didn’t say anything, but his mug entered the sink with exceptional force.
She meant to get farther into the first journal, but fell asleep watching the trail cams for night traffic.
***
On day four Sue got up early and spent the morning buying something that wasn’t granola bars that she still knew how to cook, which narrowed her options a lot but hey, noodles were cheap the whole world over.
By the time she got home, Curtis was gone. No note, no car, no biologist.
Well, fine. She’d picked up a bunch of data, half-sorted it, and left it. She could get that all tidied up to see where it started leading her next and monitor the trail cams and maybe finally crack open that first journal.
So she did. She checked the plants the wren had been eating and the plants he hadn’t been eating and the animals around him and what they’d been eating and she looked them up and thought about seed distribution and discerning the ecological disturbance caused by megafaunal extinction on an already centuries-disturbed ecology (the island had never been THICKLY populated, but agriculture never didn’t make a mess), and when she was done that she looked at the trail cams.
They told her what the wren had been doing all day. He’d woken up by the pond in the early morning, walked to the grove, eaten, walked through the thickets into the fields (as the crow flies, she realized – not much need to alter the path of your desire when you were a walking bulldozer), had a nice drink, and fallen asleep for the night.
Well, he had a routine and he liked sticking to it. Normal behaviour. For instance, Sue had been putting off looking at Curtis’s first journal for more than half a week by now. Alas, she was sapient, and therefore could only blame so much of her behaviour on instinct and habit.
So she popped it open and started taking notes.
Familiar ones.
Her brow furrowed.
Very, very familiar ones.
“About time,” Curtis said when he came back late, six-pack in hand, and saw her bent over the book, pen working furiously in her other hand.
“Took a data day,” she muttered as she flipped the page. “Listen, is-”
The door shut. Chance gone.
She took a deep breath (mildew, damp, inescapable odour of tea and dust), held it (against every urge her lungs could send her), exhaled.
Then she kept writing. And reading.
***
On day five Sue woke up – face half-stuck to the journal – to the jingle of Curtis’s car keys as he walked out the door and had to sprint to catch up with him before he left without her. He didn’t say anything, didn’t raise an eyebrow, didn’t cluck his tongue. She was almost impressed; up until now the most passive-aggressive human being she’d ever known had been her grandfather. Well, she’d learned from him. The best defense against being pointedly ignored was to ignore right back, but be casual about it. She sat with her half-packed backpack in her lap as if she were in her computer chair at home, projected an air of casual confidence that insisted that she’d long-planned on skipping breakfast today, and dismounted to the roadside with the unspoken implication that she hadn’t wanted to wear a jacket because it would spoil the nice weather.
The last, at least, was surprisingly close to reality. It wasn’t exactly dry out, but to Sue’s slowly-dawning shock she realized that a seemingly-eternal background noise was missing: this was the first day she’d spent on the island without rainfall.
Crunch. Crack.
She shook it off. Time to dive back into the field. Check the trail cams, check the behaviour, check and check and check. Grove, thickets, fields, pond.
Yes, then yes, then yes, then yes.
“Figure it out yet?” asked Curtis when he picked her up.
“Mmm,” she said, flipping wildly through camera archives, and this kept her unbothered until they got back to the apartment, when she hit a little over the halfway point on the first journal and saw it and said, entirely against her will, “what the fuck?”
“Oh good,” said Curtis, halfway through his dinner tea. “About time.”
She held up the journal and pointed to it, rendered wordless.
“Yeah. That’s a timesaving device.”
Ditto marks. The same daily format, the same data fields, but all of it filled with nothing but ditto marks. On that page, and the next page, and the next page, and the next page.
Sue flipped the book. All of it, to the very end. “What,” she repeated herself involuntarily once more, “the fuck.”
Curtis shrugged. Oversold it too, like he’d been practicing the conversation in his head for a while. “It’s not that complicated.”
“What, you just don’t want to-”
“No, the wren. It’s not that complicated. Every day it does the same thing in the same order for the same amount of time, seasonally permitting. Food, water, sleep. Everything. Took me months to realize it, months to admit it.” He was smiling now, actually smiling, the expression cutting stiffly against the grain of his face. “Took me years after that to stop bothering to buy new journals. Took me a decade to stop looking.”
Apparently there was a point where disbelief overcame anger and flooded out all other emotions. “You haven’t bothered studying the last living Nicollette’s wren in years because he bored you?”
The smile vanished, retreating into that drawn-back blankness. “No. I stopped studying the last living Nicollette’s wren because I’d finished studying it. There’s nothing more to learn because there’s nothing more that it does. I discovered that, I tested that, I confirmed that. I’m here for the funeral autopsy, whenever it finally gets around to letting it happen.” He chuckled, the fakest sound she’d ever heard. “Got to tie the ribbon on top, you know.”
“This is what you call biology?”
“This is thirty years of my life. I call it expertise. And you could thank me for saving you some time figuring it out.”
“What happened to his right leg?” The question bubbled out of her without warning, an eruption of pressure as she tried to keep every other thought filling her head from coming out of her mouth at full volume.
“Got caught in a fence once and panicked. Before my time.”
He went to bed.
She stayed up for ten minutes sitting there, thinking. Then she went through the rest of the room, journal by journal.
Just as he’d said. Nothing but ditto marks. Then nothing but dates. Then nothing. Then no more journals.
***
The next morning Sue got up an hour before sunrise and headed out ten minutes after that with fresh tea in a decrepit thermos, leaving behind as polite a note as terseness permitted. The walk would help her focus, help her think. Help her resist the unprofessional thoughts she was having trouble keeping down even after the first night’s sleep she’d had that came closer to (physically) comfortable than not. Amazing what twenty hours and counting of no rainfall would do to perk you up if you weren’t amphibious.
For once she was at the grove early enough to catch the wren entering it. He looked as tired as she felt, feathers matted and disheveled from sleep, but he still ate hearty. She spent some time keeping a running log of his breakfast. The pattern was clear, and predictable, and more or less in line with what she’d pieced together out of the first journal. A very consistent animal, which was fine by any standards as long as you weren’t a disgrace to your profession. Apparently.
She put it out of her mind. She put it so thoroughly out of her mind that she nigh-sleepwalked through the entire rest of the morning into the afternoon migration and nearly stepped straight into the pond without looking.
“Watchit!” called a piping, piercing voice. “You looking for a soaker?”
Sue shook off her thoughts on her colleague, which were now nearing monograph length. More kids were hanging around at the pond, presumably because it wasn’t raining for once and they had to find other ways to get recreationally drenched than walking home. Half of them were in swim trunks, none of them were in the water.
“Thanks,” she called across the pond.
“Ya, no problem.”
The wren snorted; she looked back at him and no, nothing new. Just blowing water out of his nose. Nothing she hadn’t seen before in less than a week. Nothing Curtis hadn’t seen for decades before he gave up looking. But… she had observers, right here. They’d been around longer than her and unlike Curtis they seemed to actually use their eyeballs.
She started wading through the shallows. They watched her approach with the sort of even-handed boredom children treated the universe with, from frogs to textbooks to movies. “Do you kids hang around here a lot?” You kids. God, she wasn’t even thirty and already she opened her mouth and her dad fell out.
The kid who answered (the same kid? No, taller and longer hair) looked unimpressed, probably because he had to deal with a dad already. “Ya.”
“See the wren a lot?”
“The what?”
She pointed at him. “The wren. Nicollette’s wren.”
“Oh, the bigguy. Ya. Every day.”
“Do you ever watch what he does?”
“All the time, real easy to get close to it, it doesn’t give a damn about anything.”
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“Reese says he touched it once.”
“Have you kids ever heard of the trample reflex?”
“Ya. Reese is totally full of it.”
“Good.” This was harder work than she remembered; what was she trying to do again?
Oh.
Right.
“Ever see what he’s doing when no one else is around?”
“Same as usual. It’s old, old people always do the same things.”
She grinned and didn’t ask if she was included in that (she was; she’d been this age once, she knew for a fact that she was). “Sure. But what does he always do when it’s just you guys?”
“Don’t you know? You put that camera up the tree.”
“You know about that?”
“Ya. Bill found it when he went up for pickleberries.”
“I didn’t touch it,” piped up Bill, who was small and made entirely of arms.
“Ya, she didn’t touch it.” The kid looked less like he was defensive and more like he was irritated. “None of us touched it, that’s pricey stuff. We’re not made of money to go paying to fix it if you say we broke it, so we didn’t.”
“Thanks.”
A shrug, the movement of both scrawny adolescent shoulders over-exaggerated almost like the wren himself.
“But the camera’s only been up for a couple days and you guys must’ve been coming here for years. You’re the experts, not me. Anything he does that I won’t have seen yet?”
The kid shrugged. “Well, it’s prolly going fishing in a minute? Doesn’t do that when it’s raining.”
“Fishing?”
“Ya. Oh, here it comes. Look out.”
Sue looked out, and oh, the wren was moving, clotted feathers swaying ponderously as he lurched his way into the pond over his ankles, his chest and thighs. There he stood like a matted little island, head tucked back, eyes shut. Not asleep, but resting.
“This is pretty much how my aunt fishes,” she commented.
“Ya, my uncle too.”
“Suckup,”” said Bill. The kid smacked her without looking; she scowled and kicked his leg.
“Still… where are the fish?”
“There. Watch this.”
“Watch what wait wait-” But too late, the skipped stone had already spun loose from the kid’s hand, bounced once twice thrice splik splik-splak thwak, skimming and sinking just past the starboard side of the dozing wren.
The recipient of the thwak bobbed at the water’s surface gently.
“Careful!” said Sue.
“What – we’re over here, it’s over there, how is that supposed to be in the trample reflex? It doesn’t care. Tammy hit it with a rock like six times last week and it didn’t even wake up.”
“It was an ACCIDENT,” insisted Tammy, who had very beautiful eyes that were currently screwed up in a begrudged glare.
“Ya whatever, seven accidents, your aim is just that bad.”
Tammy picked up a rock.
“What,” interrupted Sue, holding aloft the (still, still-dripping) form of the thwak-recipient, “is this?”
“Fish,” said the kid.
“Fish,” said Bill.
“Fish,” said Tammy, throwing the rock to the mud perilously close to her own feet. “Duh.”
“So the wren eats them? He didn’t seem interested in this one.”
“Na, doesn’t eat them. It just likes the company. It goes and sits in the water and the fish come and swim around it. Fishing.”
“Duh,” added Tammy, clearly still smarting from the slurring of her name.
Sue put down the fish on a rock and took off her backpack. “Hey, kids-”
“I’m not a kid, I’m Clair.”
“I’m Bill!”
“I’m not a kid either, I’m Tammy, are you dumb?”
“I’m Eddie,” said Eddie.
“Hey guys! Want to see a dissection?”
The kid – Clair – eyed her backpack with artificial casualness. “How big’s your knife?”
Sue unfolded it. Her audience nodded.
“Cool,” said Tammy.
“Ya.”
***
She walked home under her own power and didn’t regret a second of it because all of it was spent mentally preparing for the moment when she swung the door to the apartment open and Curtis asked her “had enough yet?” and she didn’t punch him in the face but instead smiled (sweetly, serenely, with the pure and authentic joy of discovery untrammeled by visible spite) and answered “nope! Found something though.”
He raised an eyebrow. It fought against his face the whole way. “Really.”
“Yep! Strong suspicion of cleaning symbiosis between Nicollette’s wren and some of the local freshwater fish.” She pulled the sample free from her backpack with a jerk. “GI tract was loaded with feather parasites. I guess when it’s not raining he needs to take baths for more than just cleaning off the mud. I’m not an ichthyologist, but I’m pretty sure this species’ range has shrunk over the last century or so, and I’d be willing to guess there’s now a hypothesis for why that happened.”
Curtis stared at her.
“Not bad for the first week,” she said. The smile, although authentic, was beginning to hurt.
“How the hell did you make all of that up?” he asked.
“Well, I had the fish brought to my attention by some of the local kids-” (sorry Clair, Bill, Tammy, and Eddie) “-and then I did a field dissection, which-”
“Kids? That’s your source?” He snorted. “Please. Kids make things up for fun even when they’re not bored, and the kids around here are nothing BUT bored. Hard not to be, when their parents can’t even be assed to pay attention to them. They lied to your face to see if you’d fall for it and you did, is that all you’ve got for evidence?”
She stared at him. The smile wasn’t shrinking, and it still wasn’t fake, but there was a very different force behind it and the edges were turning sharp. “That, and the dissection, and the recordings from the pond trail cam. One of the kids went up the tree and tweaked the angle for me, and the resolution’s good enough that you can see the fish tugging at his sides.” Sorry, Bill. Thank you, Bill.
The air was still. Even the mildew seemed to stop thickening for a minute.
“This wasn’t in the first journal, was it?”
He flinched. Not inward, but away from her.
“Did you ever interview the locals?”
He stood up, threw the mug in the sink, and slammed the door to his room.
Sue had never treasured cleaning up broken ceramic so much before.
***
She had to walk again the next day. The bedroom door was shut. The keys were on the rack, but like hell she’d borrow the car without asking, even if last night hadn’t happened.
Fine by her. She had to do some other stuff before she went into the field anyways. Everyone was allowed a slow day after advancing science, right?
So she prowled the classifieds until she found an apartment half the size of Curtis’s, paid her fist and lasts, got groceries, put away everything all nice and tidy, ate the greasiest late lunch someone was willing to sell her, and was happy as a clam until she remembered that she’d left her dissection sample in the fridge as a stopgap since last night.
Fine. It was fine. They were mature adults. Or could pretend to be. And when he refused to let her in, she could just write it into the monograph and find another goddamned fish. That thought sustained her buoyancy all the way back to the old apartment right to the second she knocked on the door and it swung open inwards, unlocked and unlatched.
“Curtis?”
Dead silent except for the creak of the dying hinges. No lights on. No kettle sulkily boiling.
“Curtis?”
Still no answer. No keys on the rack. No coat. No Curtis. A mug of tea on the counter and a mess in the kitchen, cupboards flapping open and gaping. The garbage was tipped over.
Sue credited her long-standing irritation with the uncleanliness of the space for making her pick up the trash. She blamed her ever-escalating lack of regard for Curtis as a person for letting her read the grocery receipts as she stuffed them back into the container.
Tea. A single six-pack of beer. A more expensive and worst-tasting brand of noodles than the kind she bought. A barrel of pesticide.
She reread the item, then read the price, then re-reread the item.
A very large barrel of very unsafe pesticide.
She didn’t even stop to grab her backpack.
***
The roads were alien to her in a way the wren’s backwoods paths weren’t – too flat, too straight, too fast under her feet. She would’ve run right past the pond if she hadn’t seen Curtis’s car pulled over on the shoulder, one wheel nearly in the ditch and the lights still complaining about the keys in the ignition. But the worn little footpath created by bare little feet was obvious once you looked for it, and once you were on it you were in earshot of the shouting. Lots of it high-pitched and squealing.
“-mind your business!”
“It’s our swimming spot!”
“You’re littering!”
“I’ll tell!”
“Stop it! Stop it! STOP it!”
A hoarse yell, a thump, and Sue burst through the treeline and into some sort of abstract illustration, maybe a political cartoon. An angry old man defending a barrel of toxic waste from a bunch of angry kids. The allegorical meaning of all the swim trunks was a little harder to parse.
Curtis looked up at her like a hunted animal, one hand resting protectively on the big grey drum. He looked more ragged than usual; wrestling that thing down the footpath couldn’t have been fun for him. “Stay out of this.”
“It’s my research subject. You know it, you signed the forms saying I was coming here to study it. I’m as in this is as it gets.”
“Right. Right. I can give you coauthor on the autopsy. You know? The kids did it. They’re always throwing rocks at it, yelling at it, one of them fed it something from their parents’ farm.” His eyes were wider than she’d ever seen them, white and desperate. “The paper of my lifetime and I’m letting you in on it damnit, you can even do the fucking cutting, just let it end. Let it END. Its species ALREADY ended, I’ve just had to sit here and watch and wait and rot while this thing zombies along, already extinct and just not dying, wasting time and eating up my career never changing never living never learning-”
He spun midsentence and grabbed Clair’s hand just as it seized the rim of the barrel, which made Tammy jump onto his leg with both hands and feet. He kicked her – crunch, that was her nose – and just as he was pulling Clair up by the boy’s wrist Sue seized Curtis’s arm in one hand and his shirt in her other and moved him away from the barrel and the kids and everyone else as quickly as humanly possible, which made quite a splash.
It also didn’t QUITE move him away from everyone else. All the noise had masked the footsteps, right up until Curtis rolled right underneath their source and three giant scaly toes were hovering an inch above his face.
The last living Nicollette’s wren froze. A single blunt-tipped talon twitched.
“ohfuck,” said Bill.
And then in that all-powerful silence the gigantic claw twitched downwards, prodded the frozen mask of Curtis’s agonized gape, and slid over and away from him. One foot, then the other. Descending with cautious joy into the pond, step by step.
He splashed gently, fanning the water with his small, useless forelimbs. The fish came to him.
“Trample reflex, schmample reflex,” sulked Tammy indecipherably through a facefull of blood and her own clasped palm.
“Eddie, go get your parents and tell them to call the police,” said Sue, wading in the wren’s footsteps. “Clair, help your friend with her nose. Bill, don’t touch that barrel.” She deviated from her course by six inches to place one boot on Curtis’s chest with a little more force than was strictly necessary. “And don’t worry, Tammy, disproving old ideas is just how science works. It looks like the wren WAS changing all those years you were watching him, doesn’t it Curtis?” Her heel sunk a half-centimeter farther, producing a wheeze. “He’s decided you’re part of the scenery. Harmless. A constant. He recognized you, and learned from you, and changed because of you, and this is how you thanked him for that.”
Curtis’s mouth was open but words weren’t coming out. Eddie was yelling in the distance, overlaid with the crash and thrash of adult feet descending down the footpath.
The wren didn’t pay any of them any more heed. Eyes closed, bath attendants nibbling at his fringes, he looked and lived just like everyone else on any other day: as best as he could, until the time came that he couldn’t.
Like everything else that ever lived.