Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 84

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 n.o.body'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 b.u.t.t 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 a.s.sistance, 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 cla.s.smates.

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 b.u.t.t. Its teeth are snaggled and stained p.i.s.s-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 G.o.ddesses 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, G.o.d 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 sc.r.a.pes 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.

"n.o.body 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.

"n.o.body 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 sc.r.a.pes 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.

No, I was right the first time. I'd rather be alone than have to explain. Besides, if you're having a baby, you should have the baby for the baby, not for you.

Isn't that right, Mom?

The harpy has a kingdom.

It's a tiny kingdom. The kingdom's just the alley behind my building, but it has a throne (the dumpster) and it has subjects (the winos) and it has me. I know the winos see the harpy. They talk to it sometimes. But it vanishes when the other building tenants come down, and it hides from the garbagemen.

I wonder if harpies can fly.

It opens its wings sometimes when it's raining as if it wants to wash off the filth, or sometimes if it's mad at something. It hisses when it's mad like that, the only sound I've ever heard it make outside my head.

I guess if it can fly depends on if it's magic. Miss Rivera, my bio teacher soph.o.m.ore year, said that after a certain size things couldn't lift themselves with wings anymore. It has to do with muscle strength and wingspan and gravity. And some big things can only fly if they can fall into flight, or get a headwind.

I never thought about it before. I wonder if the harpy's stuck in that alley. I wonder if it's too proud to ask for help.

I wonder if I should ask if it wants some anyway.

The harpy's big. But condors are big, too, and condors can fly. I don't know if the harpy is bigger than a condor. It's hard to tell from pictures, and it's not like you can walk up to a harpy with a tape measure and ask it to stick out a wing.

Well, maybe you could. But I wouldn't.

Wouldn't it be awful to have wings that didn't work? Wouldn't it be worse to have wings that do work, and not be able to use them?

After I visit the harpy at night, I go up to the apartment. When I let myself in the door to the kitchen, Mama Alice is sitting at the table with some mail open in front of her. She looks up at me and frowns, so I lock the door behind me and shoot the chain. Luis should be home by now, and I can hear music from his bedroom. He's fifteen now. I think it's been three days since I saw him.

I come over and sit down in my work clothes on the metal chair with the cracked vinyl seat.

"Bad news?"

Mama Alice shakes her head, but her eyes are shiny. I reach out and grab her hand. The folded up paper in her fingers crinkles.

"What is it, then?"

She pushes the paper at me. "Desiree. You got the scholarship."

I don't hear her right the first time. I look at her, at our hands, and the rumply paper. She shoves the letter into my hand and I unfold it, open in, read it three times as if the words will change like crawly worms when I'm not looking at it.

The words are crawly worms, all watery, but I can see hardship and merit and State. I fold it up carefully, smoothing out the crinkles with my fingertips. It says I can be anything at all.

I'm going to college on a scholarship. Just state school.

I'm going to college because I worked hard. And because the state knows I'm full of poison, and they feel bad for me.

The harpy never lies to me, and neither does Mama Alice.

She comes into my room later that night and sits down on the edge of my bed, with is just a folded-out sofa with springs that poke me, but it's mine and better than nothing. I hide the letter under the pillow before she turns on the light, so she won't catch on that I was hugging it.

"Desiree," she says.

I nod and wait for the rest of it.

"You know," she says, "I might be able to get the state to pay for liposuction. Doctor Morales will say it's medically necessary."

"Liposuction?" I grope my ugly plastic gla.s.ses off the end table, because I need to see her. I'm frowning so hard they pinch my nose. "For the hump," she says, and touches her neck, like she had one too. "So you could stand up straight again. Like you did when you were little."

Now I wish I hadn't put the gla.s.ses on. I have to look down at my hands.

The fingertips are all smudged from the toner on the letter. "Mama Alice,"

I say, and then something comes out I never meant to ask her. "How come you never adopted me?"

She jerks like I stuck her with a fork. "Because I thought ... " She stops, and shakes her head, and spreads her hands.

I nod. I asked, but I know. Because the state pays for my medicine.

Because Mama Alice thought I would be dead by now.

We were all supposed to be dead by now. All the HIV babies. Two years, maybe five. AIDS kills little kids really quick, because their immune systems haven't really happened yet. But the drugs got better as our lives got longer, and now we might live forever. Nearly forever.

Forty. Fifty.

I'm dying. Just not fast enough. If it were faster, I'd have nothing to worry about. As it is, I'm going to have to figure out what I'm going to do with my life.

I touch the squishy pad of fat on my neck with my fingers, push it in until it dimples. It feels like it should keep the mark of my fingers, like Moon Mud, but when I stop touching it, it springs back like nothing happened at all.

I don't want to get to go to college because somebody feels bad for me.

I don't want anybody's pity.

The next day, I go down to talk to the harpy.

I get up early and wash quick, pull on my tights and skirt and blouse and sweater. I don't have to work after school today, so I leave my uniform on the hanger behind the door.

But when I get outside, the first thing I hear is barking. Loud barking, lots of it, from the alley. And that hiss, the harpy's hiss. Like the biggest maddest cat you ever heard.

There's junk all over the street, but nothing that looks like I could fight with it. I grab up some hunks of ice. My school shoes skip on the frozen sidewalk and I tear my tights when I fall down.

It's dark in the alley, but it's city dark, not real dark, and I can see the dogs okay. There's three of them, dancing around the dumpster on their hind legs. One's light-colored enough that even in the dark I can see she's all scarred up from fighting, and the other two are dark.

The harpy leans forward on the edge of the dumpster, wings fanned out like a cartoon eagle, head stuck out and jabbing at the dogs.

Silly thing doesn't know it doesn't have a beak, I think, and whip one of the ice rocks at the big light-colored dog. She yelps. Just then, the harpy sicks up over all three of the dogs.

Oh, G.o.d, the smell.