Shoggoths in Bloom (38 page)

“Maybe,” she said, pulling out the other chair. “But only a little.”

Because I’m an idiot—and because my friend Allan is the coffee shop owner and my girlfriend Reesa works there—the Monday after Thanksgiving was my first day at a new job.

Total madhouse. Me and Pat foamed milk and drew shots like a flight line team while Reesa ran the register. It only worked because I’d barista’d at Starbucks and most of the customers were regulars, so they either had their order ready or Reesa already knew it and called it out before they paid. Never underestimate a good cashier.

Allan’s has a thing, a frequent customer plan. So Reesa knows the regulars by name.

“Hey, Annie,” Reesa said. “Medium cappuccino?”

Annie was petite, ash-blond hair escaping a seriously awful baby blue knit cap. She handed Reesa four dollars, then dropped the change into the tip jar.

Cappuccino is nice to make, but it’s amazing how badly some people butcher it. I ground beans and drew the espresso. Then I foamed cold milk, feeling the pitcher for heat. When the volume tripled, the temperature was right. The sound of the steam changed pitch. I poured milk over the shot, ladled on foam, and sleeved the cup. “Cinnamon?”

“I’ll get my own.” She held out her hand. I put the cappuccino in it and set the shaker on the counter.

“You’re new here?”

“First day.”

“You’re good.” She sipped the drink. “Annie Webber.”

“Zach Jones.”

I’d have shaken her hand but there was a coffee in it, and another customer was coming.

That night, Reesa’s cat Maggie tried to dig me out of bed by pulling at the comforter. I pushed her off, which woke Reesa. “Wha?”

Which is all the erudition you can expect at two in the morning. “Damn cat,” I explained.

Reesa pushed her face against my neck. “I only keep her because of the toxoplasmosis.”

Running joke. Toxoplasma is a parasite that makes rats love cat urine.

The parasite continues its life cycle in the cat after the cat eats the rat.

According to some show we saw, it affects people too. And the same show had this amazing stop-motion photography of dying bugs, moist fungus fingers uncurling from their bodies. The fungus makes the infected ants do things so it can infect more ants.

The fungus was awful, and gorgeous. One shot showed a moth, dead—I hope dead—on a leaf, netted with silver lace like a bridal veil.

The next morning Reesa said, “Hi, Annie,” but a different voice answered, “Hi, Reesa.”

I looked up from the steamer nozzle. A big guy, wearing a padded down coat. “Free coffee today?”

Reesa checked the system. “You guys have ten.”

He dropped coins in the tip jar. “Medium cappuccino?”

Pat moved to draw it. I gave her a look. “They’re all Annie Webber,” she said. “By courtesy. Sharing the account.”

“Oh.”

By the sound, I was scalding the milk. By the time I’d salvaged it, Annie Webber was gone. Reesa waved a pinkish hexagon like a foreign coin. “Zach, what’s this?”

I didn’t even recognize the metal, let alone the writing.

On day three, the original Annie Webber returned. Day four was number two. On Friday both came, not together. Then half an hour after the second, I served a third. Cappuccino, let me put on my own cinnamon. “Do you guys all drink the same thing?” I asked.

“You guys?” This Annie was a woman, with hazel eyes and crooked nose.

“The Annie Webbers.”

She licked foam off her lip. “Nature’s perfect food.”

I caught Pat’s elbow. “How many Annie Webbers are there? How long before I meet them all?”

She counted in her head. “Five come in regular. The blond and her partners.”

“Partners? Like she’s poly?”

She shrugged. “I never asked. Maybe they’re a cult.”

I groped the pinkish coin out. I’d looked it up online, and couldn’t find it anywhere.

Saturday, Annie wandered in around ten. The original in the awful toque, scarf snugged under her chin.

I handed her the cup and cinnamon. It takes just seconds to get a good foam with a commercial machine. “You left this Tuesday.” I laid the coin down.

“That should have been a quarter. Sorry.” She traded for a dollar bill. “Put that in the jar?”

“Annie. It wasn’t you here on Tuesday.”

“Wasn’t it?”

She winked and turned, leaving the money. I yelled, “Break!” and dove under the counter. Her heels clicked, but this was the smallest Annie. I caught up. Coat flaring, she turned.

“Where do you go?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You. Annie. Where did the coin come from?”

“It was a mistake. I should have looked at the change, but I was out of you—money.”

“So you use the free coffees when you’ve just come back? When you don’t have any, what, local money?”

She stared. “I’ve been coming to that coffee shop since it opened. You’re the first to ask.”

“You go other places.”

“Other . . . places?”

“Other dimensions.”

“You read a lot of science fiction, Zach?”

“You’re what, kind of multiple bodies one mind?”

“Star Trek,” she said.

“Am I wrong? Why us?” I wondered if I sounded as jealous as I felt.

“Best coffee in the universe.” She kissed me on the mouth, with tongue.

I woke itching. My tongue, my hands. The soles of my feet.

When I stumbled to the kitchen, Reesa gave me scrambled eggs, but all I wanted was coffee. Coffee and milk and cinnamon. “Zach?” she asked. I had to bite my lip not to correct her.

That’s not my name.

I have to go.

I think I’ve finally met all of Annie Webber.

“Speaking of livers,” the unicorn said, “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”

—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

My mother doesn’t know about the harpy.

My mother, Alice, is not my real mom. She’s my foster mother, and she doesn’t look anything like me. Or maybe I don’t look anything like her. Mama Alice is plump and soft and has skin like the skin of a plum, all shiny dark purple with the same kind of frosty brightness over it, like you could swipe it away with your thumb.

I’m sallow—Mama Alice says olive—and I have straight black hair and crooked teeth and no real chin, which is okay because I’ve already decided nobody’s ever going to kiss me.

I’ve also got lipodystrophy, which is a fancy doctor way of saying I’ve grown a fatty buffalo hump on my neck and over each shoulderblade from the antiretrovirals, and my butt and legs and cheeks are wasted like an old lady’s. My face looks like a dog’s muzzle, even though I still have all my teeth.

For now. I’m going to have to get the wisdom teeth pulled this year, while I still get state assistance, because my birthday is in October and then I’ll be eighteen. If I starts having problems with them after then, well forget about it.

There’s no way I’d be able to afford to get them fixed.

The harpy lives on the street, in the alley behind my building, where the dumpster and the winos live.

I come out in the morning before school, after I’ve eaten my breakfast and taken my pills (nevirapine, lamivudine, efavirenz). I’m used to the pills. I’ve been taking them all my life. I have a note in my file at school, and excuses for my classmates.

I don’t bring home friends.

Lying is a sin. But Father Alvaro seems to think that when it comes to my sickness, it’s a sin for which I’m already doing enough penance. Father Alvaro is okay. But he’s not like the harpy.

The harpy doesn’t care if I’m not pretty. The harpy is beyond not pretty, way into ugly. Ugly as your mama’s warty butt. Its teeth are snaggled and stained piss-yellow and char-black. Its claws are broken and dull and stink like rotten chicken. It has a long droopy blotchy face full of lines like Liv Tyler’s dad, that rock star guy, and its hair hangs down in black-bronze rats over both feathery shoulders. The feathers look washed-out black and dull until sunlight somehow finds its way down into the grubby alley, bounces off dirty windows and hits them, and then they look like scratched bronze.

They are bronze.

If I touch them, I can feel warm metal.

I’d sneak the harpy food, but Mama Alice keeps pretty close track of it—it’s not like we have a ton of money—and the harpy doesn’t seem to mind eating garbage. The awfuller the better: coffee grounds, moldy cake, meat squirming with maggots, the stiff corpses of alley rats.

The harpy turns all that garbage into bronze.

If it reeks, the harpy eats it, stretching its hag face out on a droopy red neck to gulp the bits, just like any other bird. I’ve seen pigeons do the same thing with a crumb too big to peck up and swallow, but their necks aren’t scaly naked, ringed at the bottom with fluffy down as white as a confirmation dress.

So every morning I pretend I’m leaving early for school—Mama Alice says “Kiss my cheek, Desiree”—and then once I’m out from under Mama Alice’s window I sneak around the corner into the alley and stand by the dumpster where the harpy perches. I only get ten or fifteen minutes, however much time I can steal. The stink wrinkles up my nose. There’s no place to sit. Even if there were, I couldn’t sit down out here in my school clothes.

I think the harpy enjoys the company. Not that itneeds it; I can’t imagine the harpy needing anything. But maybe . . . just maybe it likes me.

The harpy says, I want you.

I don’t know if I like the harpy. But I like being wanted.

The harpy tells me stories.

Mama Alice used to, when I was little, when she wasn’t too tired from work and taking care of me and Luis and Rita, before Rita died. But the harpy’s stories are better. It tells me about magic, and nymphs, and heroes. It tells me about adventures and the virgin goddesses like Artemis and Athena, and how they had adventure and did magic, and how Athena was cleverer than Poseidon and got a city named after her.

It tells me about Zephyrus, the West Wind, and his sons the magical talking horses. It tells me about Hades, god of the Underworld, and the feathers on its wings ring like bronze bells with excitement when it tells me about their mother Celaeno, who was a harpy also, but shining and fierce.

It tells me about her sisters, and how they were named for the mighty storm, and how when they all three flew, the sky was dark and lashed with rain and thunder. That’s how it talks: lashed with rain and thunder.

The harpy says, We’re all alone.

It’s six thirty in the morning and I hug myself in my new winter coat from the fire department giveaway, my breath streaming out over the top of the scratchy orange scarf Mama Alice knitted. I squeeze my legs together, left knee in the hollow of the right knee like I have to pee, because even tights don’t help too much when the edge of the skirt only comes to the middle of your kneecap. I’d slap my legs to warm them, but these are my last pair of tights and I don’t want them to snag.

The scarf scrapes my upper lip when I nod. It’s dark here behind the dumpster. The sun won’t be up for another half hour. On the street out front, brightness pools under streetlights, but it doesn’t show anything warm—just cracked black snow trampled and heaped over the curb.

“Nobody wants me,” I say. “Mama Alice gets paid to take care of me.” That’s unfair. Mama Alice didn’t have to take me or my foster brother Luis. But sometimes it feels good to be a little unfair. I sniff up a drip and push my chin forward so it bobs like the harpy swallowing garbage.

“Nobody would want to live with me. But I don’t have any choice. I’m stuck living with myself.”

The harpy says, There’s always a choice.

“Sure,” I say. “Suicide is a sin.”

The harpy says, Talking to harpies is probably a sin, too.

“Are you a devil?”

The harpy shrugs. Its feathers smell like mildew. Something crawls along a rat of its hair, greasy-shiny in the street light. The harpy scrapes it off with a claw and eats it.

The harpy says, I’m a heathen monster. Like Celaeno and her sisters, Aello and Ocypete. The sisters of the storm. Your church would say so, that I am a demon. Yes.

“I don’t think you give Father Alvaro enough credit.”

The harpy says, I don’t trust priests, and turns to preen its broken claws.

“You don’t trust anybody.”

That’s not what I said, says the harpy—

You probably aren’t supposed to interrupt harpies, but I’m kind of over that by now. “That’s why I decided. I’m never going to trust anybody. My birth mother trusted somebody, and look where it got her. Knocked up and dead.”

The harpy says, That’s very inhuman of you.

It sounds like a compliment.

I put a hand on the harpy’s warm wing. I can’t feel it through my glove. The gloves came from the fire department, too. “I have to go to school, Harpy.”

The harpy says, You’re alone there too.

I want to prove the harpy wrong.

The drugs are really good now. When I was born, a quarter of the babies whose moms had AIDS got sick too. Now it’s more like one in a hundred. I could have a baby of my own, a healthy baby. And then I wouldn’t be alone.

No matter what the harpy says.

It’s a crazy stupid idea. Mama Alice doesn’t have to take care of me after I turn eighteen, and what would I do with a baby? I’ll have to get a job. I’ll have to get state help for the drugs. The drugs are expensive.

If I got pregnant now, I could have the baby before I turn eighteen. I’d have somebody who was just mine. Somebody who loved me.

How easy is it to get pregnant, anyway? Other girls don’t seem to have any problem doing it by accident.

Or by “accident.”

Except whoever it was, I would have to tell him I was pos. That’s why I decided I would sign the purity pledge and all that. Because then I have a reason not to tell.

And they gave me a ring. Fashion statement.

You know how many girls actually keep that pledge? I was going to. I meant to. But not just keep it until I got married. I meant to keep it forever, and then I’d never have to tell anybody.