Fragile
Shaia woke to the familiar weight of darkness on her face, the pre-dawn silence enveloping her. She lay for several minutes enjoying the comforting warmth of the faded patchwork quilt that covered her. When the faintest hint of light slipped over the windowsill at the base of her cot, she knew that the day had broken. Stifling a small groan, she slipped her slender legs out from underneath the quilt and tentatively lowered her feet. Warm toes met the cold roughhewn floorboards and she gave a low whistle, throwing back the blanket as she lifted the rest of her bird-thin form free of the cot.
She pulled her worn cotton nightshift over her head, stretching her body on tiptoes toward the rafters as she did so. Free of the nightshift, she reached for a pale blue homespun tunic that hung from a nail driven above the cot. The chill morning air raised small bumps on her sunburnt skin and she quickly shrugged into the garment, much too large for her and hanging to her knees, cinching the loose material at her waist with an old hempen rope. This done, she moved to the basin that rested on a crude wooden table next to the cot. Dipping her hands into the icy water, she splashed her face, shivering with the shock of it.
Tiptoeing to the bedroom door, she pressed gently against it, wincing at the squeak of protest that issued from rusty hinges as it swung wide. She paused in the doorway, listening hard for any sound of movement from the room directly across the hall. Hearing none, she crept down the still-dark passage and through a small but tidy kitchen to the front door, snatching a basket woven of vines from a battered table as she passed. She lifted the heavy gnarled crosspiece that barred her way, grunting with the effort, and slipped out into the wan morning light.
A thin crescent of gold spilled over the horizon, wreathed, as always, in a shimmering halo of reds and oranges. Though cold now, the day would soon grow almost unbearably hot. The grass, yellowed by long days of too much sun and too little water, was enjoying a rare kiss of dew and when Shaia looked back the way she had come she could see her small footprints leading back to the clapboard-sided ranch house, once whitewashed, now weathered a nearly uniform gray.
A ramshackle henhouse, no more than ten feet long and five wide, sat some twenty yards from the ranch house, clapboard-sided as well, like a lesser-loved child. A small, penned-in area of hard-packed bare earth lay in front. Reaching the henhouse, Shaia walked around the back side and swung open a chest-high wooden panel that ran the length of the building, hooking it in the raised position to a latch on the rear wall. With the panel raised, Shaia was presented with a rear view of eight multi-colored hens, snug in their straw-lined boxes, still fast asleep. Gently, so as not to wake the slumbering form, Shaia eased her hand underneath the first hen, teasing an egg from its nest. She placed the egg carefully into her basket before proceeding to the next. After she had finished with all eight hens, the basket only held seven eggs. Shaia shook her head as she lowered the long panel into place once more. “Sixth day in a row of no eggs for poor Daisy,” she said, her mouth twisting into a frown. “A few more a those and Gram will have her on the chopping block. Though I figure it’s probably just her time. Poor thing is almost three years old. . . and we ain’t had no chicken on the table since Uncle Chane come to visit.”
Clutching the basket of eggs closely to her chest, Shaia turned the corner of the henhouse and began walking slowly back toward the main house, careful not to bounce the eggs as she moved. And then she heard it, a sound starting so low that, though faint at first, she could feel it resonating in her chest. Barely more than a whisper, the tone rose in pitch until it was impossibly high, ending with a lilt that almost seemed a question mark.
Sensing that the sound came from the east, she turned to face the rising sun. Above it, she could just make out small indistinct shapes, a dozen or more. The shapes grew larger and lower in the sky as she watched them approach, the sound swelling as they came. She could see that some spiraled while others remained locked in a steady arc. As they neared the ground on which Shaia stood, an answering call rose, coming, she thought, from the center shape. This second call was high pitched, brief but echoing. It was followed by another long, low, moaning sort of call from a shape to the right of center. As if this third call were a signal, more calls began rolling in from each side, one upon the other, wandering in tone and gaining in volume, a virtual chorus about her.
As the shapes drew nearer they resolved themselves into long, dark, massive forms with what appeared to be wings, a third as long as their bodies, lying along their sides, and a broad fan of a tail trailing behind each. Although they seemed to move slowly, flowing through the air as if it were molasses, they were directly over Shaia’s head in less than a minute and she realized that the enormous shapes really must be moving quite fast.
Now that they were overhead she could see that the underside of their wings was a bright white, bright enough to stand out in the early morning haze. The bellies of the animals (for she realized that they must be some type of animal) were mottled with splotches of the same white mixed with gray. The smallest of the titans was no more than twenty feet long, the largest, over fifty. Each had a broad thin mouth that wrapped around the front of its gigantic head, the underside of which was decorated with knobs of flesh that looked like ridiculously over-sized goose pimples. Running back from the mouth, great pleated ridges of skin ran along each body, terminating at or near the midpoint of each. More fleshy knobs ran along the serrated edge of each wing.
“Why, they must be some kind a giant bird!” thought Shaia, and whistled in amazement. The sound of her own whistle, clear and loud in the crisp morning air, made her jump. The rolling song above had continued over and through her whistle, unchanged, and she realized that the song being woven above her head was, in fact, in her head. Somehow, these colossi were singing directly into her mind, making no audible sound whatsoever. The forward motion of the creatures had slowed and they were now directly above her — weaving slowly around each other, sometimes spiraling down to within thirty feet of Shaia’s upturned eyes, wings held out almost perpendicular to their sides, sometimes shooting straight up hundreds of feet into the sky, wings folded back against their bodies, tails thrashing back and forth.
In between the acrobatics, they moved with a worm-like motion, almost wiggling through the air. “They ain’t flying,” Shaia thought, in a flash of inspiration. “They’re a swimming. Swimming through the air! Them ain’t wings — thems fins.” All the while she watched, the song continued. It was a high, sad, lonely song, unwinding like a ribbon of light in Shaia’s head. It was a song of loss and wandering. It made her think of wind and rain and sun, all at once.
“I ought to be scared a one of them falling on me and crushing me flatter than a sika bug,” she thought, as the great beasts continued to glide through the morning sky above her. “They must be hundreds and hundreds a pounds apiece.” But she stayed still, heart carried aloft by their music, feeling as if she could fly right up among them to skim along their massive but streamlined bodies, to trail her fingers along their thick elongated fins. The breeze riding behemoths looked as if they could never have moved on land, much less fly. But they pirouetted above her in a slow, graceful dance as if they were no heavier than a dandelion seed caught on the wind.
For a moment, she thought about running into the house to wake her Gram and her Da so that they could see this aerial wonder. “No,” she thought, “not sure why, but it’d earn me a beating.” The colossal forms continued to undulate above her for several minutes, as if daring gravity to take notice, their song writhing through Shaia’s mind, causing her heart to soar and dive in concert with their ensemble.
And then, as if on cue, the song abruptly changed and they began to move away, winding westward through the atmosphere. Individual voices began to drop from the song as they got farther away from her. By the time they had shrunk to specks on the horizon, only one faint voice, piercingly high, could still be heard. Then, silence.
Shaia stared after them for several minutes more, wishing without hope that the titanic skyborn miracles would return. Then she looked back eastward where the sun lay full above the horizon, as if pulled into the heavens by the leviathans that had just passed overhead. A voice in her ear made her jump.
“Beautiful, ain’t they,” said her grandma, stepping forward to stand beside Shaia. The stooped and wrinkled woman was wearing a tunic of the same pattern as Shaia’s, though less threadbare and of a reddish hue. Her eyes, too, were fixed on the horizon where the animals had vanished.
“What were they, Gram?” Shaia asked. “I never seen nothing like them!”
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“No, child, I’d be surprised if you had,” The old woman replied, eyes still fixed on the skyline. “Thems skywhales. I only seen them twice before, myself. And I been round near fifty years. You heard them, did you?” She asked, turning her head to look hard at Shaia. She tapped one wrinkled brown finger against her temple. “Heard them up here?”
Shaia nodded. “I reckon you’d have to be dead not to.”
The old woman shook her head, “Not true, not true. Your Da, up to the house still abed. He ain’t never heard them. Never will. Like most people, he ain’t got the knack fer it. That’s why most people, your Da included, never seen a skywhale. Most people got enough to worry about right here on the ground without a borrowing trouble from the sky. And if they don’t hear, they sure as shit ain’t looking up to see.”
“Where do they come from?” Shaia asked.
The old lady squinted her eyes and looked toward the horizon once more before answering. “Well, now that’s a tricky question on account a most people don’t believe skywhales is real and the ones as do think they’re mighty bad luck and won’t talk about them.”
Shaia’s brow wrinkled at this statement and she thought for a moment before asking, “Where do you figure they come from?”
“Me?” said the old lady, as if surprised at the question. “Well, once when I was a young girl, not much older than you, a traveling storyteller came to your great-grand-da’s place. He was a young feller, handsome, and seemed from another time and place. A course, Da made him work fer his keep rather than tell his stories like he wanted and the storyteller didn’t stay long. But one night, lying next to him on a haystack behind the barn and staring up at a sky full a stars, the storyteller told me about the skywhales. Said they come from a place called ‘The Great O’Shun,’ a place full a water… water, far as the eye can see.”
Shaia put her tongue between her teeth and frowned as she tried to wrap her mind around the thought of that much water in one place.
Seeing the expression on Shaia’s face, the old woman chuckled and continued, “I know, sounds like seven different kinds a crazy. He said them skywhales travel round the world following secret pathways in The Great O’Shun, and that when they come to land, they rise up out a The Great O’Shun, water streaming from their great big hulks, and take to the sky, swimming it just like you’d swim the old fishing hole. ‘Course, I thought he was telling tall tales to try and get wandering hands where they shouldn’t be. But a few weeks after he left, I heard a high, lonesome sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I ran outside and there they was, a dancing through the sky just like you seen them a few minutes ago. I thought I’d never seen nothing so beautiful or so lost in my whole life. Still think that, comes to it.”
“But why do they do it, Gram?” Shaia asked. “Why do they keep leaping out of The Great O’Shun, it can’t be just to cross the land? There ain’t no food down here for them, any more than there is up there. Ain’t no water neither. Not round here, anyhow”. She surveyed the parched yellow landscape that now appeared, in the wake of the skywhales, even more washed-out.
“Storyteller said it was on account a they lost their home in the Pockylipse and they been looking for it ever since,” the old woman replied. “Me, I think they got to. That Pockylipse, it was bad, so the stories say. Real bad. It’s only the last few generations as been able to get anything much to grow and can raise chickens that ain’t muties. The land was bad for a long, long time. I’m guessing The Great O’Shun was bad as the land, maybe worse. Anything caught in it had to light out and light out quick. Them skywhales must a figured a way to do it. Way I see it, something that big must have a pretty big brain too.”
“Shaia!” a voice barked from behind them.
Shaia started and spun on dirty bare heels to face the house. A middle-aged man, black hair thinning, back bent, stood on the top step before the door, one strap of his frayed denim overalls hooked, the other swinging free.
“You best mind them eggs, missy!” he shouted, pointing at her feet.
Shaia’s eyes darted down to where the basket lay, all but two of the eggs broken, seafoam-colored yolks leaking out through the weave, seeping into the scorched grass. With a rising wave of fear bordering on nausea she realized she had dropped the basket — most likely upon first hearing the skywhales’ song.
He read the look on her face and his own darkened with fury. “Get in the house, girl!” he roared at her. “Go on, get!”
Shaia gave the old woman a furtive, frightened glance and then lowered her head, eyes on the ground and welling with tears. She ran to the house and up the front stairs. As she squeezed past her father, he gave her bottom a hard swat with a calloused palm, propelling her into the dim recesses of the house.
“Damn fool girl,” he muttered. He looked up to see the old woman staring at him, her eyes also damp. A look of guilt flashed across his face, chased by another of anger. “You know we ain’t got no eggs to spare, woman!” He growled and stomped back into the house, shutting the door firmly behind him.
The old woman stooped to pick up the basket before turning westward, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed once more upon the horizon.
