Floods, winds, thunder and lightning, even hail. It's a crime, but what can you do - call up the search and rescue? We've all been hit hard. And less than fifty of them out there in the world. She just disappeared, as if the storm had picked her up like Dorothy and set her down in the place where the extinct carnivores of all the ages run riot through fields of hobbled game - or in the middle of a freeway, where to the average motorist she'd be nothing more than a dog on stilts. Mac didn't particularly care about that - nobody's insured for weather anymore and any and all lawsuits are automatically thrown out of court, so don't even ask - but what hurt was the fact that the Patagonian fox got loose, and that's the last native-born individual known to be in existence on this worn-out planet, and we still haven't found the thing. Two days ago the wind came up in the night, ripped the roof off of one of the back pens and slammed it like a giant Frisbee into the Lupine Hill condos across the way. It's not even the rainy season - or what we used to qualify as the rainy season, as if we knew anything about it in the first place - but the storms are stacked up out over the Pacific like pool balls on a billiard table and not a pocket in sight. Of course, there isn't going to be anything left of the place if the weather doesn't let up. And you can say what you will about pop stars or the quality of his music or even the way he looks when he takes his hat and sunglasses off and you can see what a ridiculous little crushed nugget of a head he was born with, but I'll say this - he's a friend of the animals. I manage the man's private menagerie, the last surviving one in this part of the world, and it's an important - scratch that, vital - reservoir for zoo-cloning and the distribution of what's left of the major mammalian species. And I'm not name-dropping here, not necessarily - just stating the facts. Besides, I have skills, special skills - I'm an animal man and there aren't many of us left these days, and my boss, Maclovio Pulchris, appreciates that. I might be seventy-five years old and my shoulders might feel as if they're attached at the joint with fishhooks, but the new kidney they grew me is still processing fluids just fine, thank you, and I can still outwork half the spoonfed cretins on this place. And then Lily would have something more than chicken backs for dinner.Īnyway, there are trees down everywhere and the muck is tugging at my gum boots like a greedy sucking mouth, a mouth that's going to pull me all the way down eventually, but not yet. If somebody has to come, why couldn't it be Teo? He'd be easier - him I could just kill. Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, my ex-wife, my wife of a thousand years ago, when I was young and vigorous and relentlessly virile, the woman who routinely chained herself to cranes and bulldozers and seven-hundred-thousand - dollar Feller Buncher machines back in the time when we thought it mattered, the woman who helped me raise my daughter, the woman who made me crazy. I'm out feeding the hyena her kibble and chicken backs and doing what I can to clean up after the latest storm, when the call comes through. Russell Timothy Miller, and Richard Goldman The author would like to thank Marie Alex, The earth died screaming While I lay dreaming… - Tom Waits, "The Earth Died Screaming" C.Įvery spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world, a heaven.
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