We Are Ash Page 5

  Dolores started researching the CDC's protocols for dealing with new contagion on the public internet. She dreamed of working at a place like the CDC, but in her heart of hearts she suspected it wasn't nearly as exciting as it appeared in disease-porn oldies like Outbreak or 28 Days Later. They did have an internship program, and Dolores had most of the listing memorized by heart at this point, but you had to be in college and working toward your degree. Which hopefully she would be soon.

  She also started poking around to see if she could figure out what sort of disorder Ash had, if any. Dolores researched stroke symptoms on language centers, schizophrenia, and even how different people learned language, but she couldn't quite pin down what Ash's exact pathology was.

  The longer the day went on, the more Ash began to seem like a figment of Dolores's lonely imagination. Now Dolores wished she'd kept the molted clothes in the house as proof that Ash had been there at all. An Ash chrysalis. Maybe Ash was super weird because she was just a cobbled together creation of Dolores's own socially desperate mind. She could almost see her coworkers' sad head shakes as Dolores carried out an animated conversation with nothing in the alley.

  Her fears were somewhat allayed when she arrived home to find both her note and the sad pile of clothing still very much on her porch, but no naked Ash in sight. No longer felt angry or confused, Dolores felt worried. Ash was her only human—her crazy bitch—and she had gotten attached in a very short period of time. She wished desperately that Ash had given her a phone number, but now that she thought about it, Ash hadn't seemed to have a phone, or a wallet, bulging in her pockets. She'd had nothing: just Ash.

  Dolores made herself a quick lunch of apple slices dipped in peanut butter before hopping back on her bike. She'd sworn she'd never be one of those baristas that hung out in their coffee shops on their days off, but just about everyone she knew were fellow Starbucks slaves. She also wanted to see if Ash was there, awkwardly—and nakedly—trying her hand at ordering coffee again.

  But Ash wasn't there either. Dolores breathed a sigh of relief that Lane and Rachel were the only two working the sleepy afternoon hour. They were both kind enough and neither tried to hit on her. They were both enrolled part-time at MSU, but Rachel was raising her brother's two-year-old while he did a stint in prison after nearly blowing himself up cooking meth in an abandoned trailer. Dolores babysat for Rachel occasionally and had hoped that the two of them would become friends, but Rachel's life was already bursting at the seams with no room for a social life.

  “Hey, did you happen to see the chick I left here with yesterday?” Dolores sidled up and asked. “She's about your height, well, maybe, but she has long straight blonde hair and really vivid green eyes.”

  Lane crept over and joined the conversation. “I saw her,” he whispered dramatically. “She was pretty hot, but weird. Like, really weird.”

  “That's an understatement. Have you seen her today?”

  “Nah, I just saw you talking to her yesterday and saw you leave with her when I got off shift.”

  Both her coworkers stared at her, waiting for more information, but Dolores stumbled over her words, “We, uh, I just, oh. I was supposed to meet up with her today, but she wasn't there and I thought maybe she came here. Anyway, if you see her, will you tell her to come by my place?”

  “Can do,” Lane said with a lopsided grin.

  Dolores thought he was cute, but he was about eight inches shorter than her. She didn't particularly care, but she knew from the way his eyes skimmed past her that she had never even registered as a sexual being to Lane. Chance, who she hated with a bright fury, was a similar height, but made comments constantly about his desire to explore and conquer the Amazon, always with a wink and a skin-crawling look up and down Dolores's body.

  She thanked Lane and Rachel and stepped out into air that bit into her skin and she saw the first tiny bits of snow spitting out of the heavy layer of gray clouds that had settled on the valley, blocking the mountains and the sun. By now she felt sick with worry over her potentially naked and unshod new friend, possibly lost and undoubtedly being weird enough that she might as well be in jail or in a psych ward or at the ER.

  9 The Sky Ice Bits

  Snow is the mouth-noise the humans use for the sky ice bits. We unmade ourselves again after we discovered how the ice bits bite into our soft, seemingly pointless hide. We consider giving our squishy, clawless body a nice pelt like the bear, but we suspect this would make the other bipeds upset. For creatures that regularly do all manner of unnatural things, they are easy to distress when we improve on their suboptimal corporeal form. It is nice that the Dolores is not so easy to distress, and that the Dolores is still mostly nice even when we do. But for now we must acquire the special jacket thing that the Dolores spoke of for fighting the biting ice.

  We remake ourselves in the lair of the No-Tip, Unmade, Not-Nice One. We prowl through the place, knowing from what we learned while breathing into it that it does not have any humans of its own. It was All Alone in its mind. We are almost sorry for the not-nice coffee-juice human when we see the images of the pleasant looking human with it behind a layer of clear-hard. There are many such images and we wonder if the companion human was unmade and is also bad at remaking like the not-nice biped. We are not All Alone. We have the Dolores.

  In its nesting chamber we find it has a whole subchamber filled with biped drapes. Many of the drapes are now in boxes, but we easily find a set that we can adjust ourselves to fit. We like these round-hard closures. Buttons? Yes—buttons. We like the buttons. We find a set of the shoes that seem to approximate the running foot covers we have spied on other humans slogging around attempting to run. We put our feet in them but are perplexed by the long strings that criss-cross up the shoe and dangle on either side. We will ask the Dolores. Or maybe we will watch the running ones. We do not want the Dolores to think we are stupid. We are not stupid, but we are young and have much to learn.

  We put several layers of drapes on, in addition to the shoes for running. We find no jacket in the drape heap. We poke around the rest of the den and at last find a whole secret stash of the jackets behind a door. We feel the smile happening again: clever bipeds, hiding their valuable jackets. Perhaps their decision to stay in the same shelter again and again is not so dangerous. We shrug on a jacket and now we are oozing moisture from our entirely hairless hide. We do that when we run too. We hurry out into the swirling snows. The snows are now clustered on the ground in tiny piles at the base of all the many things the bipeds construct everywhere. Now the Dolores will not have the sad, want-to-fix-it look on its face. It is nice that it wants to help its crazy bitch. But its crazy bitch does not need help.

  Now that we wear the correct foot covers we run, but the other humans stare at us still even though most of the silly bipeds have their heads down burrowed into jackets and hands stuffed into the side slits of the jackets. We hate the strings, they keep tripping us, but then we see the elaborate twisting the other bipeds have in their shoe strings. The Dolores must have cut off the dangling part of its shoe strings: our clever, crazy bitch.

  We practice the twisting after staring at several sets of covered human feet. The humans tried to skitter away, but we were too fast. They yelled some no-point noises and some make-sense noises, but we figured it out! We twist our strings just so and we do not trip! Now we can run fast.

  We run all over the Bozeman that day. Later we will probably stash our jacket and breathe into a biped to learn. We haven't learned much at all today. The last one we learned things from allowed us to go to a place with giant, brightly lit hives full of bipeds and the stench of so many of them filled the air. We learned much in that place, the Las Vegas. We want to explore other hives like that.

  We are not sure if we should go back to the Dolores yet. In our observations, some of the humans require periods alone between times with their packs. The protocol of this pack-alone ratio escapes our discernment. We miss the Dolores, and we are eager
to know if it is not-sad now that the Danny is fixed. We will go to the Dolores after dark. Humans are not nocturnal and do not see well at night, so we get many looks when we are out after dark. But we do not know if the Dolores will invite us into its shelter again, so perhaps we will wait until daylight.

  In the meantime, we consider who we would like to breathe into on this day. We realize that we could learn more about the Dolores if we breathed into one of its fellow green-drape-wearing, coffee-juice humans. We smile and run to the Starbucks. We shift our face—we do not want the Dolores's pack-mates to fear the Ash face that Dolores knows. We make our head pelt short and curly. We make our eyes dark and we make our skin pasty pink. We shrink our body until our clothes-things are long. We are a juvenile human now. We even push out some of the strange red face spots that many of the juvenile humans have. Then we wait.

  We spot the Chance. We have seen and heard this one having not-nice interactions with the Dolores and we have seen the Dolores cringe away from its pawing. We have also seen it take shiny and flappy things from the TIPS clear-hard when the Dolores was not looking. We may breathe into the Chance twice. We are filled with rage when we think of the Chance touching the Dolores's hindquarters. We consider a bear noise. Instead, we run in front of the Chance as it disembarks from its exoskeleton. “Automobile.” We learned that word from our dictionary, although we left it at the Dolores's lair hoping it would be safe there.

  We have learned that it is better not to speak to those we wish to breathe into. They sometimes make very loud mouth-noises. They sometimes run away. But they are very slow and easy to tire. We intercept the Chance. When it says, “Hey, retard, what are you—” we cut it off and breathe tendrils of our multitudes deep into the Chance's lungs and we find all the things about Dolores in its mind.

  It makes gagging and choking noises as well as other no-point noises. The Chance is indeed from a place of many, many hives. Giant Hives. The Chicago. The Chance came to the Bozeman for the skiing. We see what the skiing is. We see a very large shelter and large exoskeletons, we see other things we wish we did not see. We see the Chance doing something unpleasant to another biped, a thing involving its small appendage. We have seen this before, but not like this with a human that is not the same maturity as the Chance, and also it is crying. We see that the Chance thinks about doing this thing to the Dolores and we roar a bear roar and push more of our multitudes into the Chance before we inhale it all back out, watching the sniveling, disgusting biped drop to the ground, hacking blood-juice and even maybe lung onto the dusting of snows that layer the dark black not-rock the humans use to make exoskeleton paths.

  We make more bear noises until the Chance emits the foul fear smell. Then we smile and we leave the Chance and hope that we never have to breathe into the Chance again. The Chance was a not-nice mind to be in. We didn't realize until the Chance how not-nice breathing into a biped could be. The Chance is up and has leapt onto our small back, but we stumble to a corner near the large receptacle for waste and when it wraps its surprisingly strong arms around our neck, we crumble to ash and unmake ourselves, relishing the Chance's terrified screams, wet with blood-juice.

  10 The Red Death

  By the third day that Ash had been absent, Dolores began to feel panicky. She assumed that Ash would show up after she'd checked at Starbucks, but she hadn’t. What’s more, that same afternoon they called Dolores in to cover for Chance, of all people, because he'd called in sick. They didn't give any details, but Rachel said that he had a wet, racking cough and sounded terrible. Dolores cringed. She'd be washing her hands even more than usual today now that the Black Death seemed to have come to Bozeman. Or maybe the Red Death was a better name for this new plague.

  Ash never showed that night or the next day when she covered opening shift for Chance either. Or that Friday, when she was just back working her own schedule. She heard that Chance was in the hospital. Serves him right, Dolores thought, but couldn’t help but wonder about the larger ramifications of his sickness as well.

  That evening when Dolores took the trash out she saw a pile of clothes and she stifled a scream. They were stacked in a blood-spattered, deflated heap. Dolores considered whether she should call the cops, but what would she say? Someone had dumped their bloody jacket, pants, and oddly tied running shoes behind a Starbucks? And like it or not, the pile of clothes practically screamed “Ash!” at her. It was again an odd mash-up of men's and women's clothing, and while that in itself wasn't strange in hippy-yippy-yuppy Bozeman, the running shoes made Dolores remember the odd shoe conversation she'd had with Ash. Plus the shape of the pile—like a molted skin—made Dolores's stomach flip-flop as she remembered the same sort of laundry leavings she'd found on the floor of her house.

  Dolores didn't mention it to anyone, but she did take the clothes home after packing them into a plastic bag. Her little rental house wasn't much, but it at least had its own stacked washer-dryer—Dolores’s favorite feature. Laundromats were her definition of hell. She wasn't a germaphobe or anything, but it still weirded her out that someone else's dirty underwear might wind up with hers. Or that someone might be putting their damp, but unclean towels in the dryer. Her mom used to do that and it made Dolores gag. And the forced socialization of the laundromat was worse than a bus. No matter how quickly you tucked your headphones into your ears or jammed a book up to your face, someone always had some inane conversation they wanted to have.

  Dolores washed the clothes with a healthy dousing of hydrogen peroxide to get the blood off—blood she desperately hoped did not belong to Ash, but that begged the question of whose blood it might have been. A question Dolores wasn’t ready to ask.

  She and Danny were back to texting every day again, but he was increasingly worried about their mother and planning a trip back to Musketon to check on her on his next off day. He begged Dolores to go, but she shot him down saying that she couldn't afford it. She didn’t say that she also didn't care. He told her that she was being a selfish brat and Dolores replied that she’d learned it from their mother. She pulled the almost bloodless clothes out of the tiny washer and poured a second round of hydrogen peroxide on them, watching it foam up in places she couldn't even see blood. She started the washer again.

  Snow had scuttled down on and off since the day Ash disappeared and had gradually accumulated into a grainy layer about four inches thick. The conditions were more like hail than snow—probably because it was so goddamn cold. Kill a homeless person cold. It had been twenty-below-zero the night before with winds that found every crack in Dolores's old kit-built house from the seventies. She probably would've called Ash in to cuddle just to ward off the temperatures Dolores's furnace stood no chance against. Dolores even texted her landlord to find out if it was okay to use the old wood fireplace. It was, but Dolores didn't have any wood. Another thing to add to the list of expenses.

  Dolores checked her weather app. The cold-snap, unseasonable even for Montana, was due to break by Monday, but that was three brutal, cold nights away. She decided to drive around in the morning in search of firewood. When Dolores started her way out of the house to her car, though, she shrieked. Ash—her eyes glowing in the snow-illuminated dark—stood on her porch in nothing but a button-down dress shirt and jeans. Ash shrieked back in a perfect imitation of Dolores's shriek, and Dolores flung open the door to drag her blue-lipped, trembling friend into the relative warmth of her house.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Ash! You'll kill yourself if you don't get a jacket!”

  “We meant to get a jacket, but we were running. We didn't know the snows would hurt our hide so much.”

  “Your hide? Where have you been? You shouldn't just leave like that! I was worried about you.”

  “We wish the Dolores would worry about us instead of the hateful You.”

  Dolores sighed heavily. “I was worried about Ash.” She put her hand on Ash's arm and her skin was so cold that Dolores started rubbing it to try to warm her up. After a moment she
started doing the same on the other arm. Ash's head cocked to the side, stopping herself just shy of bonelessness, and stared into Dolores's eyes. Dolores furrowed her brow knowing that Ash was likely hypothermic given the color of her skin. She didn't feel quite friendly enough to hop in bed naked with Ash and share body heat, but she could at least fill the tub with warm water and try to warm her that way.

  Dolores took Ash's frosty hand and led her to the bathroom. She was certain Ash was not the same size she had been before, but she tried to brush the thought away as delusion. Maybe her own towering height made it hard for her to judge smaller people.

  “Come on, we've got to warm you up or you'll die in blissful, hypothermic sleep.”

  “We are surprised with how poorly human bodies handle the cold. We were not outside long. Is the Dolores mad at us?”

  “Yes, you shit! Where did you even go? Why did you leave your clothes here? Did you just run off naked? You should at least leave me a note next time. And you need to stay here until this weather blows over. Where have you been staying? I thought you were dead, Ash! I thought I'd never see you again!” Dolores's voice cracked as she said the last thing, and only then did she realize it was true. She had been holding back the terrible fear that she'd only been granted a friend to have the universe take her away immediately, like some sort of karmic taunt. Like so many other things in Dolores's life.