We Are Ash Page 4

  “Who is the Danny?” Ash asked with none of her typically effervescent curiosity.

  “He's my older brother. We usually talk pretty often.”

  When she looked up from sending the text she saw that Ash's face was, well, ashen.

  “Does the Dolores come from the same mother-thing the Danny came from?”

  Dolores raised one eyebrow and nodded slowly, “Yeah, the Dolores does. We do have a different dad-thing though. Our mom was not particularly easy to live with.”

  Ash's eyes darted around and her breathing accelerated. Dolores hardly begin to fathom what part of this was confusing or upsetting for Ash, but then, just as suddenly, Ash's face resumed its typical placid expression and she nodded with an odd, half-cocked smile.

  “We hope the Danny calls the Dolores soon. We do not wish for the Dolores to be sad.”

  “Yeah, me neither. Let's play some Mario Kart, that usually helps keep the sads away. I'll teach you how, though I hope you're better at gaming than you are pronouns.”

  “Why would we be anti-nouns?”

  Dolores burst out laughing and handed Ash the controller. “Let's see if you can learn the function of a couple buttons and a joystick.”

  “We do like to learn. We like joy. And we like sticks. We will probably enjoy the Mario Kart.”

  And playing Mario Kart with Ash did bring Dolores joy, if not sticks. Four or five years earlier a younger Dolores might've been ashamed to be friends with someone so unabashedly strange, but now Dolores could see that Ash was just what she needed at this point in her life. And the woman seemed equally delighted to have found Dolores. What’s more, she seemed content with Just Dolores—she was already everything Ash had hoped for. It was nice to be enough for someone for a change.

  7 Fixing The Danny

  We underestimated the connection between humans that are very far apart from each other and we see now that it might jeopardize our new connection with the Dolores. The Dolores is the only human we care about, but the Danny, not us, is the most important thing to the Dolores. We could feel its distress about the Danny's absence, and we fear that the Danny has not remade itself. If the Danny is not remade, the Dolores might be very sad. We wanted the Dolores all to ourselves, and it seemed that we were well positioned since it hasn't aligned itself with a pack in the Bozeman. But we were surprised by our own feelings of sorrow when the Dolores felt sad.

  We grin to ourselves—it is a thing that happens to our face when we feel joy. We laid on the couch thing after the Dolores suggested that we “crash” in its lair. The Dolores is very concerned about the homeless. We are very concerned about the safety of the Dolores being in one place over and over. But we will stay with the Dolores. We will keep the Dolores safe. No one will unmake the Dolores. Just Dolores. Our Dolores.

  After roaming around guarding for a couple hours, the Dolores yells at us, but is a nice yell. It tells us to knock it off and to go to sleep. Since we don't know what to knock off of what or where the sleep is located, we settle back onto the couch until the Dolores rises from its nest. We try not to be hurt that we were not invited into the obviously cozier and roomier nest that the Dolores uses in the other compartment of her shelter. We hear the Dolores rise and go into the smallest section of its lair and we hear noises that are different than mouth-noises.

  We open the door to the small place. The Dolores is not in its drapes. It is often naked after being in its boxy nest, but now it sits on a special seat filled with water. The Dolores also emits water, but nitrogen smelling water. Then it emits a long string of no-point noises, frantically waving one arm at us and covering its udders with the other. We ignore the Dolores. “What is the Dolores doing?”

  “I was hoping to take a shit, until you scared me so much that it probably crawled back into my small intestine! Get the fuck out, Ash! What is wrong with you?”

  “We are fine. Is the Dolores fine? The Dolores does not smell healthy. What were the noises?”

  “Get out of my bathroom, Ash! We're not ten-year-olds! We don't go to the damn bathroom together.”

  We note that the large white trough must be a bath if this is a bathroom. The humans must groom themselves with the silver part that spouts water. They have perfectly serviceable tongues and live in social groups, so we question why this structure is necessary, but we suspect this is another elaborate system that the humans have created to support their vast numbers. The Dolores is still shouting while we inspect the bathroom. We recall this smell happening when we breathed into some squishy bipeds. Foul smells were rare, but a sharp, eye-watering nitrogen smells, the human-water smell, is common. We suddenly realize they are fear smells.

  “Is the Dolores scared? We will protect the Dolores.”

  Then the Dolores is pushing us out of the bathroom. We like it when the Dolores touches us and we wish we were naked too so more of our flesh would be pressed against its flesh. We tell the Dolores again not to be afraid. The Dolores assures us it is not afraid but that it will kill us if we don't go away. We know that the killing is a kind of unmaking and we feel hurt that the Dolores would kill us for investigating her fear-stink-making. But we suppose the squishies have rules about how other humans must act in their lairs, like the no-Ash-in-the-nest rule. Since we haven't had any opportunities to observe another human in Dolores's lair, we may have miscalculated.

  We decide to go fix the Danny. We suspect from the newspaper that the coughing of the blood-juice is not sustainable long-term for the humans. We decide that going while the Dolores is still in the small room is the simplest; we suspect that the Dolores would yell about it if we unmade ourselves in front of it. We swirl up and out of the human box and over the low skyline of human lairs that make up the Bozeman. We head toward the sun, over the high, jagged mountains and across wide swaths of land that remain mostly uninfested by humans except for the long, slender paths they create for their rolling exoskeletons.

  We find the Danny easily, passing near where the bear has rotted and been picked apart by crows and coyotes on our way. The Danny didn't go to a healing place. The Danny went to its shelter instead—a rolling shelter on blocks far from the wood cave of its mother-thing. The Danny certainly doesn't look like it knows how to remake itself properly. It is collapsed on a couch of its own.

  The Danny is pale and much thinner than when we breathed into it and pulled part of it back out. We almost remake in our Ash form, but we stop. We have recently realized that the humans are especially adept at identifying other human faces. We have not yet mastered this skill, but we also fear that the Danny might be able to describe us to the Dolores. We must look different.

  We saw a picture of a healer in the newspaper. It wore a white body drape, but we do not feel like trying to find drapes. We will make our face like the healer. We swirl back into a mostly hairless bipedal form and watch the Danny. It has its eyes closed and it breathes in a ragged, wet way that is not typical of terrestrial animals. We want to touch our flesh to the Danny's, which would be easy since it wears only a small piece of cloth covering the small appendage that it keeps between its legs. We want to know if it would feel nice to touch it, like it feels nice to touch the Dolores, or whether it would feel not-nice.

  It is surrounded by white items clotted with dried blood-juice. We know we were almost too late. We are afraid. When we fixed the Dolores, it only worked because we care about the Dolores. The Dolores also only lost a tiny amount of itself when it inhaled and expelled us accidentally. When we almost made the worst mistake.

  When we first touched the Dolores, we wanted desperately to breathe into the Dolores—we wanted to know all of the Dolores, to be inside the Dolores—but we also did not want to hurt the Dolores, so we will never breathe into the Dolores. But we almost did. We were tempted.

  We think about the way the Dolores feels about the Danny and now we will touch the Danny. We focus our mind on the Dolores. The Dolores cares about the Danny as much as we care about the Dolores. We place our hand ov
er the face of the Danny and it gasps and a great spray of blood-juice spatters our hand and face and we close our eyes and concentrate. We can feel the cough spiraling up into our hand and along our veins and the Danny breathes deeply and dryly for the first time since it inhaled us. We do not like this touching—we can feel a bit of unlearning, some part of what we took from it leaving us. Not all of it, but enough that we feel sad and weak.

  Its eyes fly open and when they meet our eyes, we suddenly remember to change them. Humans are very fixated on eyes. We had our Ash eyes in the wrong face. Now we have different eyes. The Danny screams a no-point noise and swats our hand away in a not-nice way considering that we just saved it from imminent unmaking. Then it jumps to its feet and grabs us before shouting about the You again. That You is everywhere, we cannot escape it.

  We feel relief that we are done here and we unmake ourselves in the Danny's grasp and watch it fall to its knees and stare at its hands, making horribly sob noises. We think that if the Cody had more useful things in it to learn, we would visit it next, but we do not think we will. It might shoot us again. We will return to the Bozeman. To the Dolores. And it will not be sad about the Danny anymore.

  And we will not be sad anymore either. When we acquire the new drapes for the day, we will also acquire running foot things. The running shoes.

  8 An Empty Pile

  Dolores emerged seething from the bathroom after taking the most high-strung shower anyone outside the Alien franchise had ever taken. What the hell had that bathroom-barging idiot been thinking? Furthermore, what had Dolores been thinking letting some weird stranger she just met insane stay in her house?

  When Dolores popped her head out of the bathroom she didn’t see Ash, so she ducked into her bedroom to dress. But when she came out riled up and ready to lecture Ash on the importance of privacy, there was no one there. Just Dolores. The house was empty. The watched-ness was still gone too, though, so that at least was an improvement.

  Dolores pulled her phone out of her pocket and texted Danny again: dude, i'm worried about you, would you please just text me that you're okay?

  She was about to go into the kitchen when she stopped short. There, next to the couch, was a small, deflated-looking pile of clothes. They weren’t tossed aside the way a person took clothes off—the pants crumpled over Ash’s flip-flops like they had fallen right off her legs, and the shirt looked emptied in the same manner on top.

  Dolores looked around and then warily nudged the clothes with her toe, fearing that either her new friend would pop-up like some kind of Ash jack-in-the-box or that she’d get covered in some kind of cytoplasmic goo. But it was just an empty pile of clothes. Then again, Dolores wasn't sure why it surprised her that Ash would take her clothes off in a weird way. Everything about Ash was weird.

  She proceeded to boil water for instant oatmeal and a cup of tea, the breakfast of bland British champions. Then she poked around the house some more, realizing that if Ash's clothes were on the floor Ash had either stolen some of Dolores's clothes or she was gallivanting around naked. Dolores felt fairly certain that the second option was the correct one. If Ash had gone in her bedroom it would have been with a series of oddly phrased, inscrutable questions.

  Dolores ate quickly and then finished checking the crawlspace and behind the lattice on the sides of her very small front porch as she drank her tea. No Ash crouching in the darkness with the raccoon that alternated between startling or being startled by Dolores. Next she had been certain that she would find Ash taking a dump in her tiny excuse for a yard, given that the women seemed completely unfamiliar with the concept of a bathroom. Or privacy. Or sanity.

  Now she was annoyed. What the hell kind of houseguest disappeared buck-ass naked from their host's house? And who left a pile of laundry as a thank you? It was infuriating. Dolores felt weird just leaving without the mystery solved, but she felt equally weird waiting around for someone to return for her abandoned clothes. What the actual fuck?

  With a growl, Dolores threw on her heaviest hoodie, wrote a note with directions to the library on the front door, and moved the shed skin of Ash to the rickety porch swing. Then she pulled her bike out of her tiny entryway and headed to the library to surf one of the public computers. If nothing else, she could look up some services to help Ash get back on her feet.

  Her irritation had subsided by the time Dolores arrived at the library. She'd just settled into a chair and was scanning a front-page news article about some new disease that was making people cough up blood when her phone chimed. A woman old enough to live in a mausoleum shot Dolores a dirty look and Dolores rolled her eyes as she silenced her phone. It was Danny:

  can you talk?

  The elderly librarian’s eyes widened as Dolores quickly unfolded herself from the chair. Old people were particularly gobsmacked by her gargantuan size, especially the ones like this one that were five feet with their granny heels. Once she was out in the cool, silent, pre-snow air, she immediately called him.

  “Danny! What the hell? I haven't heard from you at all in weeks!”

  Danny let out a barking cough. “I know, I'm sorry. I got super sick and things have been weird as fuck up here. A guy that I work with did something super fucked up a couple weeks ago, and then I've been completely out of it until this morning. Then... I uh, I just got better today. This morning.”

  “Uhhh, okay? Are you sure? There’s some weird thing going around…”

  “Yeah, yeah. Weird huh? But, um, don’t worry about it. Seriously, you’ve got enough stress already. I'm sorry.”

  “You should be, asshole. But it’s good to hear your voice. I was worried.”

  “Thanks, Lori. How're things? Any progress on financial aid yet?”

  “Not this year. Next fall. How's the job? Still in existence?”

  “Yeah, thank Christ I got sick on my rotation off. I did have to call in sick yesterday and today, but I can go back tomorrow. Which is great, they keep axing everybody. Have you heard from Mom at all?”

  “No, but I never fucking hear from Mom. Not that I'm complaining.”

  “Don't be a douche. I haven't heard anything since I got sick, though. I even tried to call her when I got sick to see if she was—” Danny hesitated and Dolores had the distinct impression that there was something Danny wasn't telling her. “To, uh, see if she'd come up and take care of me, you know?”

  “Mom taking care of someone? Naw.”

  “Look, Lorri, I'm just worried. She's supposed to be on oxygen all the time now, but she won't wear it because she says The Lord will take her in His own time.”

  Dolores thought her eyes would get stuck she rolled them so hard. “Why don't you just head down there on your next break if you're so worried about her?”

  “You could meet me there for a visit. I heard that Colt is back in town and freshly divorced, probably lonely…” She could almost hear Danny's smirk.

  “You can just shove it, you bastard. I never should've told you about him. I'm over it.”

  “Maybe if you hadn't run off without saying goodbye...”

  “I better go, I'm at the library.”

  “Oh come on, don't be like that. I'm sorry, I'm sorry—”

  Dolores interrupted him, “And how's your little pet project? What was her name again? Brittany? The cute ones are always Brittany’s.”

  “Nothing going on. And Brianne, not Brittany. She hated it up here and I wasn't quite ready to move on yet.”

  “So you’re just going to waste your entire youth up there in that STD-filled, dick-dominated town?”

  “Maybe you’d be less lonely if you came back to sample the sausage festival every once and a while.”

  Dolores laughed. “Actually, I think I made a friend.”

  “A special friend?”

  “No, just the regular no-dick-in-me type.”

  “Well, I guess that's something. Who's the dickless wonder?”

  “Her name is Ash.”

  Danny started hack
ing and wheezing again, but Dolores decided to continue.

  “She came into work yesterday and she's on the run from an abusive boyfriend or something. He fucking shot her! Can you believe that? Anyway, I felt bad and she was pretty cool so we hung out last night and she played Mario Kart with me before crashing on the couch. She bailed this morning, though, so maybe it was a friend one-night stand? But it was nice, ya know?”

  “Ash? That's kind of a weird name,” Danny said, a hesitation creeping into his voice. “Is she from there?”

  “She said she's from all over.”

  “What if she slit your throat or something? Classic hobo behavior.”

  “She's just homeless, okay? Can you blame her? And she wouldn't hurt anyone. She's sweet, in a lost cat kind of way.”

  “Lost cats can have rabies.”

  “She's not rabid, you ass.”

  “Have you even taken her to a vet yet?” Danny asked with a chuckle. “I mean it, though, be careful. I know you've been having a hard time down there in the banana belt and you're super depressed, which I know will get worse as winter settles in—don't interrupt me, I can sense it—but don't let that make you stupid. Maybe I can come down for Thanksgiving. Hell, by then I may be crashing on your couch too. Is Ash hot?”

  “Kinda? Also out of your league, but that doesn’t take much,” Dolores answered. “I actually can't wait for you to meet her. She's a trip.”

  After a little more chatter, they got off the phone, but Dolores noticed a reluctance on Danny’s part to hang up. Hopefully it was just his own loneliness that made him sound so forlorn and not something worse. She even called her mother's landline, but there was no answer. Then she tried her cell, but it went straight to her voicemail. Well, at least Danny couldn’t guilt her anymore.

  Back in the library Dolores finished reading the newspaper article about this terrible new pneumonia or whatever it was. There’d only been twelve cases and one death, so the CDC hadn't declared any sort of emergency yet. Dolores thought of Danny's cough and felt her skin prickle up into goosebumps. Then she saw a picture of the man who had died and realized that it was a customer, a regular. He was an asshole, but she still felt herself choking up and, more selfishly, wanting to slather her entire body in hand sanitizer. She gave an experimental cough into her hand, looking for blood, thinking back to the strange bloody noses. What if it wasn't the flu, but ebola? Or Andromeda Strain?