Chapter Two
"Death certificates are only twenty bucks a pop," I heard Mother tell Mrs. Blather over the phone one day. I was only five years old and still trying to figure out if I was a boy or a girl. Midgerette was pretty sure I was a girl because I liked to draw a lot, and from what she'd observed that was something mostly girl-people liked to do. Midgerette was all about the odds. Everything was a calculation for her. She was always "twenty percent" this or "eighty percent" that. I did like to draw, especially her silvery-tipped wings. I wished I had wings but that was something surely zero percent of people-people had. I didn't know what "a pop" was and neither did Midgerette, though she was "seventy-two percent" it was a sort of candy and "fifty-eight" percent it was a drink and neither one of those made sense and that is what I told her.
"Gull-people know what gull-people know," she shook her tail feathers and muttered. "It's all about context with your kind."
I wondered if Mother was buying or selling. Mrs. Blather did most of the talking and I only heard Mother get a sentence in now and then, and usually what she said meant nothing at all to me. One time she shouted at Mrs. Blather the following words:
"Chad robbed a campground!"
I was "ninety-percent" that Mother was not the best person in the world. She used to complain that I spent too much time with my other-people friends. She thought they were less than useless.
"If they're even that," she'd say while brushing her hair and admiring her face in the mirror.
"How come they never built no cities? Tell me that," she'd say.
I'd have to sigh for the billionth time and explain that THEY never NEEDED cities because they were already ADAPTED to their environments and lived where they BELONGED, and of course she never listened which is why the billionth time and all that.
"I've got nothing to say to them and they've got nothing to say to me," she used to say. She didn't believe in “the talk”, which is what Midgerette called it when different kinds of animal-people were able to understand one another. Mother said that was something out of ancient fairy tales and was just as stupid now as it was back then. She would see me talking to Midgerette, and come charging at my friend with a broom and pull me away by the elbows.
"I know what you need, young lady," she'd lecture me. "You need more friends of your own kind, and you know what I mean. Stick to your own kind and don't give me none of your lip."
"Yes, Mother," I'd mumble with no intention of doing any such thing. I had enough friends of my own kind already. There was Random Williams for one. Random was the boy I liked best in school. Joker Variety was also a friend if you call it 'friend' when they steal your stuff and push you down on the ground and then say sorry they were only joking. Mother was all about boys learning boy things and girls learning girl things and “figure it out because it matters,” and “do what I say or else you know what.”
"I used a hairnet," Mother said one time on the phone and that was pretty confusing because there was a bald guy and he was apparently dead in a bathtub, and I was pretty sure I must be missing something.
"It's a living," was another wisecrack she enjoyed on multiple occasions.
Midgerette saw things panoramically. When she was up and away the magnetic lines were red and features of interest were blue and gold. Food was something that four-dimensionalized, and depending on how many facets it displayed she would figure the odds to swoop or not to swoop. She could see a french fry in several layers. The competition was fierce for those. Mostly she made the usual rounds and did quite nicely for herself. She used to play this game with me called “can you see that?” where she would point her beak in some direction and I could never see what she described was there. She said I was as good as blind, that all people-people were.
“It's a wonder you all can manage to get around,” she'd say. “You need a map to see what's right in front of your nose. And speaking of noses,” she'd say, “you don't even have a word for hard-of-smelling, which is what you all are. I see you looking and sniffing, but you don't see much of anything, and it's got to stink pretty bad before you even notice.”
I had a squirrel-people friend named Folder, and he thought Midgerette was exaggerating her own special gifts.
"She'll say anything," he complained. "She'll make it up. Makes it all up on the spot. No way she sees for twenty miles around. Of course, I myself can smell a nice ripe walnut from halfway around the world, but that's just me, it's what I do."
Folder had crossed the electrical wires and other gull-people had told him differently about their capabilities. Ten miles tops, maybe fifteen on a good gust day when the magnetic field lines stretch out in dots. He could smell a hurricane, he boasted. He could even hear an earthquake. Folder was pretty sure that being a mammal made him a better friend for me than a bird could ever be, and kept asking if it was true that most people-people never learned "the talk", or was it that they used to know it and then forgot? Or was it that they knew it and pretended not to? Because sometimes people would be seen talking to creatures as if they were really doing it, but when the creatures talked back it was clear the people had no idea what anyone else was saying. Or maybe people-people just weren't ready yet. Maybe they had to finish building all their cities first. All the other creature-people had had "the talk" forever and ever and ever.
Folder had a very fine tail, quite bushy and long and red in the light. He was much admired by many kinds of people, or so he liked to say. He could chatter for hours, very talky. He could scramble up and down any kind of pole or tree and locate anything, anything at all. One time he found a green plastic stick that Migo the mouse had smuggled out of a coffee shop and dropped along the way. That was blocks ago, maybe miles. I remember everything Folder told me when he was still around. I was maybe nine by then. Things were happening fast.
"Candles, go to bed," Mother used to tell me every night. My name was never Candles but that is what she called me so it might as well have been. I only ever called her "Mother" even after she told me we were not exactly “family”. She lived in the old guy's house and I lived in one of the sheds in the back yard. Midgerette used to visit me on the windowsill after I was put away for the night.
The old guy had a rusty old car in the yard that was really good for target practice. Mother shot that thing to hell. I don't know how old I am, exactly. I think I'm maybe seventeen by now? It's kind of hard to tell. I guess I will just tell you what I know. I should start with the facts, which is not necessarily the truth, because it turns out that what I was taught was only what they wanted me to know for their own purposes and reasons.
I'll start the fact that all things are connected and reflect one another, but you already know that. It's putting two and two together that's somehow the challenge. Like with “the talk”. It's obvious that people-people have language, and that people-people are animal creatures of this planet, but somehow they don't believe that other animal creatures of this planet have language. Mother didn't believe it. Nobody seemed to. How could I be the only one? Mother said I was pretending, day-dreaming, playing at make-believe.
“Don't tell me about your squirrel friend,” she'd say, “and don't even start with that stupid seagull. If that bird had any sense at all she'd keep a million miles away from me.”
But I wasn't making it up. I heard what I heard and I knew what I knew. I could understand them as easily as I could understand my own kind friends. Random Williams, for example. I listened to everything he said, even when I didn't want to. He was all over the map. Anything that came his way made it into his lipstream. First it's something about bacteria and what they want us to know about inner space. Seriously that boy speaks virus even. He had a lot of ideas. He said we were doing everything all wrong, that we could keep our bodies warm by vibrating our skin cells at resonance. We don't even need clothes at all. He said that regular people-people could do just fine eating only once a week if it was a certain kind of worm, by which I mean a replica they could mass produce and flavor as they liked it. He said that our kind could modify our body parts far beyond their original design. He said that we could literally turn ourselves into any kind of thing we wanted to be. He said that we – he and I and all our friends in the sheds in the yard – that we weren't any kind of people-people at all. We were something completely different, something new in the world. He didn't know how he knew these things, that all these thoughts were just flowing through his body, and also they were blue and pink. Sometimes I sat in my room and felt like I could stay in one spot forever, never moving, never changing, never needing anything from the world. But not in that spot. Not in that room. I had to get out of there and fast, before it was too late.