We Are Ash Page 2

  Dolores endured this bizarre feeling for almost two weeks before she decided to try and find a psychiatrist who would see her for cheap or free. The problem was making an appointment. She was frequently scheduled for shifts about ten minutes before they started, and planning a doctor's appointment beyond a trip to CVS MinuteClinic for a flu shot was nigh impossible. So she did her best to ignore it, wishing she’d made at least one friend here in Bozeman she could confide in. She even considered mentioning it to her coworkers, but eventually decided against it in order to preserve the one safe space she could escape thinking about the sensation for a while.

  Then one exhausted Tuesday she finally made the friend she was hoping for. Although lately the watchedness had taken a disturbing turn from creepy to familiar—almost pleasant, even. If that wasn't a sign of severe loneliness, Dolores didn't know what was.

  Dolores had opened that day, and Chance— that fucking chode—had made the same clitoris-Dolores joke that everyone who had ever even heard of Seinfeld made as she took her place at the cash register. Running the register was the most dreaded of her rotating duties. So many people, so many comments on how goddamn tall she was, so many idiots unable to figure out a chip reader or how to scan a goddamn phone. She'd managed to avoid it for two weeks after Shauna had broken her ankle and liked standing in one place, but there was no more avoiding and Shauna had been rotated to the other Starbucks.

  The first customer was a woman she had never seen at the shop before. Dolores greeted her with a grimace that tried hard—but not hard enough—to be a smile. The woman mimicked the grimace so perfectly that Dolores laughed. The stranger laughed too, and it sounded eerily similar to her brother Danny's. She had unbelievably vivid grass-green eyes—almost glowing—with thick black eyelashes and high cheekbones.

  “What can I get for you on this fine morning?” Dolores asked.

  “We would like the brown hot coffee liquid.”

  Dolores burst out laughing again and the woman responded in kind.

  “So… black, then?” Dolores smiled.

  “Brown.”

  “Nobody orders brown coffee. What does that even mean?” Dolores replied, trying not to get snippy now that a line was forming behind the woman.

  The stranger looked truly perplexed, and Dolores suddenly felt sorry for her. She was obviously foreign or confused. Her voice was strange, like someone had stirred several voices together, but still somehow pleasant.

  “We will have the typical thing,” the woman said firmly after a moment of hesitation.

  Dolores tried to control the snort that came out of her. “Okay, I'll get you a coffee. That'll be two-twenty-five.”

  The woman furrowed her brow. “We are tired of the You. Coffee juice is what we asked about. Two-twenty-five what?”

  Dolores took one look at the line behind the woman and closed out the transaction—she could pull it from the tip jar later. She quickly poured a coffee for miss pretty-but-crazy and passed it to her. Their fingers brushed and Dolores almost gasped at a sudden-onset sense of deja-vu. The woman's green eyes bored into Dolores's, and she’d never felt so seen in her entire life. It was like this woman really knew her— cared for her—like they had known each other always. Dolores shook her head. She turned to her next customer and tried to forget the odd sensation.

  That turned out to be pretty easy once the caffeine rush hour started in earnest. Dolores couldn’t help but feel bitter about how poorly the customers treated their friendly neighborhood pusher. Didn't they know that she was the gatekeeper to the only thing that got them through their mornings? That she controlled an entire line-item on their monthly budgets? By nine, the tide of caffeine-seeking zombies had slowed to a trickle and she skipped out from behind the counter for her break. As she crossed over into the seating area she saw the earlier stranger was not only still there, but was also reading a dictionary. A regular English dictionary—not a translation aide.

  What the hell? A person like that can't exactly have their pick of friends, Dolores thought and beckoned to the woman.

  The woman looked around before mimicking the gesture back at Dolores. Maybe she was from some cult and this was her first time out of the underground bunker where she'd been held since birth. That story alone would be worth sacrificing her break. The woman's clothes were certainly an odd mix—an oddly fancy man's shirt, tight, girlish skinny jeans, and flip-flops despite the weather. She also had no jacket, and Dolores gathered that the woman wore no bra since her headlights were set to bright. Dolores went over to the table in the corner and was again met with the almost unbearable intenseness of the strange woman's eyes.

  “I'm gesturing for you to come outside. Come on. I don't smoke, but I need some fresh air.”

  The woman's face was pure bafflement. But she stood up and smiled a real, radiant smile—not the mimic grimace. It looked a little like her facial muscles had just decided to do their own thing since mission-face-control was manned by a lunatic.

  “We go with it? With the Dolores?”

  “Who the fuck was your English teacher? You've got to stop talking like that.”

  “We hate the YOU!” the woman practically shouted.

  Dolores hastily guided the woman by her elbow, noting that she hadn't touched her “brown” coffee. The woman also stared at Dolores's hand where it touched her, like she'd never experienced such an intimate gesture. Dolores towered over her—the woman must be five-three or five-four, just like Dolores's own mother.

  “Why do you hate me?” Dolores asked once they were outside the building.

  “Not the Dolores,” she answered. “The You. All humans talk about the You. Who is the You?”

  Dolores tried to take in this gibberish and get to whatever nugget might be at its core. The juxtaposition of pure whack-jobese with seemingly sane countenance made her suspect there was more going on here than met the eye. She took a deep breath and said, “Okay. I'm Dolores, yes?”

  “Yes, the Dolores.”

  “Nope. Nobody is 'the' Name. Just Dolores.”

  “Just Dolores.”

  “So, who are you?”

  “We are not the You!”

  “No, everyone is a you. Not just you,” she touched her lightly on the shoulder. “When I talk to that guy,” Dolores pointed at a random guy, “I would call him 'you' because I don't know his name. My name is...” She gestured herself again, “Dolores.”

  Understanding rippled across the woman’s face like sunlight bursting from behind thunderheads and her radiant smile replaced the earlier scowl. Oddly, she seemed only able to smile involuntarily—whenever the stranger tried to smile, she looked vaguely terrifying, like she might bite your fingers off.

  “Ash. We are Ash.”

  “Ash is the name... people... call this human?” Dolores asked and waved at the woman, feeling ridiculous but thankful to have made a breakthrough.

  “Yes. Ash. We are Ash.”

  “Where are you from? You should say, I am Ash.”

  The woman crooked her head so far to the side she looked like some sort of owl and Dolores began to fear that she would somehow snap her own neck. Clearly she didn’t understand.

  “Say it,” Dolores encouraged. “I am Ash. My name is Ash.”

  “No, we are Ash! Yes.”

  “Goddamnit, I'm gonna slap you in the face if you don't come to your senses.”

  Ash's face lit up again. “Yes! Slap the You in the face!”

  Dolores took a deep breath. “The You is not a specific... human. You is a way to refer to anybody. I'm a you, Ash is a you, that person is a you. Stop saying 'the' in front of everything.”

  The woman's face was deep in thought. Then she nodded very slowly. “We can see how that could be the case.”

  “No, it is the case. I'm telling you. I don't know where the hell you're from, but trust me. I’m pretty sure I have more experience with English than you.”

  Ash still appeared angry about the way Dolores was dropping you's left an
d right. Her nostrils and upper lip trembled like an animal restraining a growl.

  “The English is what you call the mouth-noises?”

  “What the hell are mouth—” Dolores paused, deciding to choose her battles. “Yeah, yeah. That's right. But words. We are saying words, but they happen to be in English, some people say words in other languages.”

  “We mostly say the word-noises in English. And sometimes in bear.”

  “Did you just say you speak bear?”

  “Not all the bear word-noises.”

  “Words. Word. Not word-noises. But could we get back to the whole bear thing? Don't tell people you speak bear or they will lock your ass up.”

  Ash's head rolled to the side again and Dolores could not resist the urge to stop her from going any farther by laying her hand against Ash's temple. Ash rubbed her head against her hand like a cat and Dolores yanked it away, alarmed again by the pleasant déjà vu feeling before her nose started to run. It was blood, again. A shiver rippled over her.

  “The Dolores is losing the blood-juice,” Ash said. “Do not lose more. The Dolores needs the blood-juice. What is the ass? And where do they lock it? And who?”

  As Dolores reached into her pocket for a tissue, Ash ran her finger along the bridge of Dolores's nose. She could feel that in the strangest development yet, Ash had just stopped her nosebleed.

  Dolores wiped her nose and eyed Ash. She was starting to believe that Ash's eyes were legitimately bioluminescent from how vivid they were, but that was insane. So was a magic-nose-bleed-cessation-touch, though. She must be imagining things.

  “That’s how you use you. I was referring to Ash. And it was metaphorical. I don't mean that anybody will actually put your ass,” she pointed to Ash's ass, “anywhere. They'd put all of you, your whole body, in a jail cell or a mental institution.”

  Ash considered this for a long time. “Humans are confusing. We like the Dolores. We know it has to go back to the line of demanding humans. Can the Dolores meet us later?”

  Dolores glanced at her watch. Ash was correct, almost to the second, that her break was over. Despite all the myriad forms of strangeness Ash had displayed, Dolores kind of liked the weirdo. And it felt good to talk to someone who didn't think she was the weird one. Plus she their interaction had only made Dolores more curious about this character.

  “Sure. I'll be done at three, you want to—”

  Ash's nose and lip trembled again and Ash began to make growl that sounded—god help her—bearish.

  “We are not the You. But we do. We will be back for the Dolores. Do not let the demanding humans make the Dolores sad.”

  Dolores nodded in something close to actual, medical shock and returned to the cash register, stopping quickly to wash her hands. She felt a silly smile on her face, though, as she returned to work. She was determined to finish the rest of her shift without letting the demanding humans make her sad.

  4 The Learning

  We spent more time preparing to meet the Dolores. After our breathing into the mother-thing, it was apparent posing as the Danny was not effective. The mother-thing seemed to sense that we were not the Danny and it upset the mother-thing. We are sure it would upset the Dolores as well. We decided to return to the we that we were with the bear and the Danny's pack. It was a good we.

  When we first came to the Dolores, we remained unmade to see what the Dolores did, how the Dolores lived. When the Dolores labored at the brown juice factory, however, we remade ourselves several times and breathed into other bipeds to see what we could learn. We learned of the place we were—a “city”—but mostly we learned useless things. We learned the word for the hot brown juice that the Dolores was in charge of making and doling out to the other bipeds—coffee. The squishies are very particular about this juice.

  We breathed into one of the not-nice-to-the-Dolores humans. It didn't put any shiny disks or green flaps in the clear-hard container that has TIPS and three dots and a curved line. The Dolores smiles when humans put these things in the container. It was from them that we learned of the coffee. Mostly we have focused on learning the system of symbols they use to indicate things to one another. It is a simple system and we are intelligent. Reading is what they call the deciphering of the symbols. They turn their mouth-noises into these symbols. Elaborate and clever; the humans never let us down with their systems.

  We also practiced using our breathing into bipeds to better effect. The squishies are feisty about us pillaging their memories. They are stingy and we are so greedy now that we have watched the Dolores and want to know the Dolores. We know that breathing into them is not healthy for the soft ones since they all seem to cough up their red-life-juice afterwards—blood. We learned to make our face different every time, as the humans are very good at recognizing faces and we didn't want the face we show the Dolores to be a face that has made human cough blood-juice.

  We suspect that the Dolores would not like us breathing into the other squishies. We do not want to breathe into the Dolores, we do not want to hurt the Dolores. We unmake ourselves when the Dolores is not in the Starbucks. We make ourselves and watch the Dolores while we are in the Starbucks because there are always other humans doing things in the Starbucks.

  We learned that we have to be careful with how closely we watch the Dolores when we are unmade. The Dolores is sharper than many of the bipeds. It could sense us somehow and it was uneasy. We tried to put the Dolores at ease—we thought nice things about the Dolores. Then the Dolores accidentally breathed us and we accidentally hurt it. But we learned we could fix the hurt. We learn, yes, we are always learning.

  Once the Dolores was at ease with our watching, we decided we would interact with the Dolores as a biped. We are drawn to the Dolores. It is important to us that the Dolores wants to have us as a companion. We feel lucky that the Dolores does not already have a pack. We have observed that most humans travel in packs.

  Some humans appear to mate for life, which startled us. We thought the humans divided to make offspring. Elaborate again! They mate like many of the other creatures we observed before we were the we that we are now. There are so many we assumed they were more similar to bacteria or algae. We breathed into the not-nice-to-the-Dolores-squishy twice, curious what it thought about having us breathe into it. It thought we had a disease that we gave it. It thought we were a plague and we were very insulted. We are no plague. We feel confident that the others—the once-breathed—will likely recover from being learned from. But even if they do not, we are hard-pressed not to see the humans as the plague on this planet, not us. Perhaps it was concerned we were competition.

  The Dolores was stern with us in our bipedal interaction, but it was a nice yelling. We successfully interacted with it without breathing into it. We learned many things, even though we didn't breathe into it. We like the Dolores. The Dolores likes us too we think, though the Dolores also seemed confused by this which made us feel a little sad. But we think that maybe the Dolores is in a state of high stress from the Starbucks.

  The Dolores tells us that we are the You. That it is also the You. We are still working on not being enraged at the You. The You seems unavoidable. We learned that the Dolores is also the Just Dolores, which appears to be the truth, we have not seen it perpetrate any injustices. This is more evidence that there is a Not Dolores as well as the Just Dolores. It is the Only Dolores for us though.

  The Dolores agreed to see us again. We knew from our observations and from listening to other humans’ English mouth-sounds that if we stay too long and watch the Dolores too closely, we are a creepy. We looked this up in our dictionary and it is not-nice. We do not wish to be a creepy. Therefore we have to leave the Starbucks despite wishing to stay with the Dolores. We decide that it is fine—we will change our face and find someone interesting to breathe into.

  We walk down the street and observe the different ways the humans interact. We stop to look at a newspaper that someone has left carelessly on the ground. We like the new
spapers for context. We have discovered that humans expect all other humans to have a certain set of facts at hand. We ingest these facts using reading. That is when we see that our breathing into has been noticed. A small batch of the English words indicates several humans we breathed into are in the hospital—a place of healing.

  The humans indicated were continually coughing up blood-juice and had required a transfusion. We use our smile face when we see that the not-nice-breathed-twice-human is the only casualty. It, the He, had been unmade despite several transfusions. Perhaps when it remakes itself, it will not engage in not-nice-to-the-Dolores behavior and put the requisite items in the place of TIPS.

  We put the newspaper in the proper receptacle, which is not difficult. Yet there are things everywhere on the streets and grass that are not in the proper receptacle. The worst we have encountered is the special goop the humans use to lubricate their mouths and keep them from smelling foul. This goop sticks to our foot covers and is very stretchy. We roar at the goop and learn that using bear-mouth-noises is unacceptable in groups of humans. Then learn to run. We like running in the human body, it feels meant to be. We feel we could run forever in this form.

  We decide now to do more running while we wait for the Dolores to be done at the Starbucks. So many of the humans watch us that we are concerned we have not understood some custom surrounding running. We have seen other bipeds running about, so we know it is not the running itself. After a mile—that is what they use to measure distance—we begin to see that the skeptical human faces are pointed at my foot-protector-flaps.

  After concentrating, we remember that the other running humans had different foot coverings than these ones. We only wear these because we were denied entry and given many strange looks when we didn't wear foot things. Shoes is how the squishies refer to them. Despite that, we run until we are not amongst so many humans, then we duck into a hidden place to unmake ourselves. We will have to come back for our drapes and shoes. It is relaxing for us to be unmade after a long stretch of being surrounded by humans. Being with the Dolores alone does not make us so tired.