Plumage by Nancy Springer

Author:Nancy Springer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504009393
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy

EIGHT

“Racquel,” Sassy asked, “what have you lost?”

“Huh?”

She stood still to give him a break from limping along after her. In the green twilight between the trees, deer grazed on the moss; one of them was pure white and looked soft-focus, as if it were posing for a Breck shampoo ad. Two ibises stood on the rocks like spirits; overhead two small pomegranate-colored birds fluttered and giggled, beak to beak, while others called, out of sight in the green labyrinth above. Sassy wondered whether Racquel was seeing it with the same yearning that she was, or even seeing the same scene. What he found depended on what he had lost, and she knew that he must have lost something; everyone has lost something. Life was loss, in her experience. “What are you finding?”

“Huh?”

“Here. In—”

“In this damn jungle?”

“It’s not a jungle!”

“Yes, it is.” He glared at the deer. “Look at them. Graze, graze all day, but wait’ll you lie down to sleep and they sneak up and stick their horns in you.” Before Sassy could recover from speechlessness, Racquel shifted his glare to the ibises. “Those ten-inch beaks, you know what they’re for? They’re for picking your liver out after the horny sneaks kill you.”

“Racquel, they are not!”

“Are too.”

“You big baby, nothing is going to hurt you!”

“Says who? What they got such big beaks for, then? I tell you, something is going to kill us if we don’t die of starvation first.” His glare widened into a stare of desperation. “Tell you what. You grab one of those funny-looking birds, and I grab the other, and we wring their scrawny necks—”

“No!” Sassy recoiled from him the way she would rear back from a snake. “Don’t say things like that!” Unthinkable to kill the bird-spirits of this paradise; didn’t he know that?

“—make a fire,” Racquel was saying, “and—screw it, forget the fire, I’ll eat them raw.”

“You’re talking just like a man,” Sassy told him. Oddly, seeing him as a man made her willing to forgive him. Men were supposed to be insensitive and require humoring. “Get a grip, doofus. Raw ibis is never served in the finer restaurants.” Mushrooms were, however. And mushrooms grew everywhere, their moonstone colors underfoot nearly as vivid and various as the birds overhead. Feeling an eerie sureness prompt her, Sassy bent and grabbed several periwinkle-blue ones, caps, stems and all. Straightening, she took a large bite out of one. “Manna,” she declared, offering a handful to Racquel.

“Are you crazy?” he yelped, flinching away from her. “That could be poison!”

“It’s good. Like blueberry bread.” Sassy ate greedily as Racquel watched her with white-rimmed eyes like those of a spooked horse, as if he were waiting for her to topple in agony or perhaps to emulate Alice in Wonderland in sudden feats of gigantism. Sassy did neither. She devoured all the mushrooms, belched with satisfaction, and told him, “They’re really very good.” Remembering he was a man, she added, “Meaty. Like portabella.”

“I’m happy for you.” Judging by Racquel’s sardonic tone, he had more to say, but he was interrupted by a jingling sound and the muffled rhythm of hoofbeats.

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