Read Strange Mammals Online

Authors: Jason Erik Lundberg

Strange Mammals (19 page)

She stood over Moz’s groaning form, then flipped him over and began punching him repeatedly in the balls. Moz screeched and tried to protect his groin, but she slapped his hands away and continued.

“Give me black eye, you fuck! Like to beat up women so much, ah? Fuck you, you pissoir!”

After several long moments, but not before Savita had reduced Moz to a weeping fetus, several more CNB officers stepped in the room to pull her off of him. As she stood, she gave his cullions a final kick, and I swore I could hear a popping sound.

“Enough, Savi!” said the officer closest to her, a tall Malay man. “We got him, it’s over! Enough!” I didn’t like his familiarity with her, the way he held her upper arms, nuzzling his mouth to her ear. He led her outside, as two other CNBs bent down to carry Moz away. A third stepped behind me, and there was a cutting sound, then a plastic snap, and my hands came free. The CNB lifted me under the armpits into a standing position, and I stomped the numbness out of my feet.

“Come,” he said, “let’s go.”

He escorted me out of the air-conditioned bedroom and into the living room. Tables and chairs lay in smashed ruins, the front door hanging by one hinge. Out the open window, the light blue of dawn signaled brighter times ahead. Moz was dragged, limp, groaning, outside. Savita was talking to the Malay officer in low tones, and as she reached up to touch his face, I felt my stomach drop. I’d been even more deluded than I thought.

She saw me and walked back over, her eyes glowing. “Told you it would have been a stupid plan.”

“Yeah, but now I know why.”

“Thanks for your accidental assistance, but I’m sorry it won’t help you. I’m afraid Tinhau’s laws apply to citizen and foreigner alike.”

“But what . . .” I swallowed. “What about us?”

“Take it however you like. It was real as it was happening, if that’s any comfort.”

“What’s happening to your face?”

“What?”

Her eyes blazed with light now, twin suns in the darkness of her face. Her lips rippled, parted, and a flood of tiny
ikan bilis
swam out and puddled on the floor between us. The gushing sound of a fierce river rose in my ears, and past Savita the walls were gone, were they ever really there?, a massive river of time flowing and roaring into the past and the future. Flying fish leapt and cavorted from the river, growing improbable wings and lifting up into the skies. Savita had grown wings herself, as had her Malay colleague, who also sported the head of a speckled grey cat with pale blue eyes. Everyone had wings now, even me; I wiggled my shoulders and could feel them bounce on the muscles of my back.

“You’re all . . .” I searched for the word, unable to drag it up from the depths of my mind.

Savita smiled with her wavering lips, then turned and joined hands with what must have been her real lover, and with a small hop that launched them upward, they flapped their strong fleshy wings and took flight. I couldn’t let her go, I loved her, right? You don’t just allow the kind of love we had to get away so easily. I ran after her, disregarding the “Oi!” behind me, stretched out my wings, and at the banks of that mighty chronic river I jumped, hurtling upward, the wind rushing past my ears, Savita still in sight as I accelerated, closer and closer, her hair swishing wildly about her head in a halo, so close, so close, almost in reach.

~

You lead us through endless low-ceilinged corridors, following some inscrutable pattern of piping lines or electrical trunking overhead. I can see no end to this labyrinth of greyness, but you seem to know exactly where we are headed, guided by some internal positioning system of which I am unaware. Gone completely is your feral animalistic nature, purged by your killing of the revolutionary. Now you are the apotheosis of purpose and confidence.

After the hundred thousandth corner, I tentatively reach out and touch your shoulder, and ask you to stop for a moment. I need to catch my breath. You do not startle at the contact, or fly into a frenzy, but simply turn, and say, “
Very well
.”

Hands on knees, I breathe deeply, oxygenating aching alveoli, trying to regain some semblance of myself. You lean against the wall, one booted foot crossed over the other, tapping a cryptic rhythm which echoes lightly around us, the ticking a code of your mind’s inner processes. You are no less dangerous than before; in fact, with your newly rediscovered cognizance, you may be a great deal more.

I ask if you know who I am.

“Yes. I have always known.”

Who am I?

“It is unimportant in this place. You are you. In the outside world, you completely replace all the cells in your body every seven years, meaning that you are a totally different person than the one you were seven years ago. You are now, right now, a different person than before you entered this place. Once you leave, once you alight this existence, you will be different yet again, and it will be up to you and the actions you take that will determine the you whom you will become.”

This is not the answer I was hoping for.

“It is the truth. If you did not want the truth, then you should not have asked.”

With this, you edge off of the wall and open a door next to you, one I didn’t detect before. A blazing illumination floods the grey corridor, and temporarily blinds me. Though it should by all rights roast the flesh from my bones, the light is cool, soothing, welcoming. The light feels like home.

What now?

“We are here.”

Where is here?

“The end of this life, and the beginning of the next in the everlasting cycle.”

Will I meet you again?

“Almost certainly,”
you say, a note of affection in your voice
.

I step through to another world.

Notes

First off, I have to thank all of the wonderful editors of the magazines, anthologies and literary journals who bought many of the stories in this collection over the past decade, and worked closely with me to make each piece better: Forrest Aguirre, Eric Marin, Marcy Smith, Salvatore W. Delle Palme, Carolyn Kellogg, Erzebet Carr, Carmelo Rafala, Wei Fen Lee, Travis Anderson, Rudi Dornemann, Luís Rodrigues, Michael Jasper, Darin Bradley, Amanda Lee Koe, John Klima, Matthew Kressel, Dave Bonta, Beth Adams, and Samuel Montgomery-Blinn. Also, thanks are due to superstar John Kessel for his unofficial mentorship during my undergraduate years, and his advisory role for my postgraduate degree in creative writing; as well as to the instructors of the 2002 Clarion Writers Workshop for championing short speculative fiction: Patricia C. Wrede, Terry Bisson, Leslie What, Geoff Ryman, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Karen Joy Fowler and Tim Powers.

And last, but definitely not least, I must thank Keith Brooke, for reprinting my third-ever published story back in 2005, in the original online incarnation of Infinity Plus, and for showing unswerving support for my writing in the years since; only a passionate nutter such as Keith would have thought bringing out three short fiction collections in two years by such a relative unknown as myself would be a good idea. I am forever grateful for his particular brand of insanity.

~

Some of the stories in
Strange Mammals
appeared originally, in slightly different form, in the following venues:

“Most Excellent and Lamentable,”
Text:UR—The New Book of Masks
, Raw Dog Screaming Press, March 2007

“The Artists Pentaptych,”
Lone Star Stories
no. 6, December 2004

“Avoirdupois,” The Raleigh
News & Observer
Sunday Reader, December 2006

“Strange Mammals,”
Zouch Magazine
, August 2011

“Screwhead,”
Hot Metal Bridge
no. 2, Fall 2007

“The Time Traveler’s Son,” Papaveria Press (limited edition standalone book), December 2008;
The Immersion Book of Science Fiction
, Immersion Press, September 2010

“King of Hearts,”
Ceriph
no. 6, Fall 2013

“One Big Crunch,”
OPi8: New Dark Culture
, July 2005

“Jimi and the Djinn,”
The Daily Cabal
, November 2008

“Night Off,”
Fantastic Metropolis
, December 2003

“Enlightenment,”
Intracities
, Unwrecked Press, October 2003

“Stuck,”
Farrago’s Wainscot
no. 7, July 2008

“TCB,”
Microcosmos: Orbital Decay
, studioKALEIDO Press, December 2012;
Esquire Singapore
, August 2013

“One Less,”
Farrago’s Wainscot
no. 2, April 2007

“Solipsister,”
Electric Velocipede
no. 9, Fall 2005

“Wombat Fishbone,”
Sybil’s Garage
no. 5, March 2008

“Air is Water is Air,”
Ceriph
no. 2, January 2011

“The Apokalypsis Pentaptych,”
Qarrtsiluni
, October-December 2008

“Complications of the Flesh,”
Bull Spec
no. 7, Spring 2012

About the Author

Jason Erik Lundberg was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Singapore since 2007. He is the author of nearly a dozen books, including the collections
Red Dot Irreal
and
The Alchemy of Happiness
(also available from Infinity Plus Books), as well as editor of
The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
and
LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction
.

Discover more works by the author at
Jason Lundberg dot Net
.

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