All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,119

around her ankles as her feet squished into something like soil.

A few steps later, Patricia was walking into the loose sod up to her mid-calves. She smelled something sweet, like a hundred flowers in a single bouquet mixed with a fresh bag of cane sugar from her old bakery job. The kind of sweetness that’s comforting and nauseating and appetizing all at once. It grew stronger, every step forward Patricia took, and meanwhile the racket underfoot was swallowing her calves whole each time she stepped down.

“That’s it,” Carmen said from nearby. “Just let it happen. Keep walking forward. I have an errand. I’ll catch up with you soon.”

Patricia started to protest, but she could tell she was alone in the dark with the rich sugary aroma and the terrain that was gobbling her up, inch by inch.

She wanted to turn and run back the way she’d come. But she could tell that wouldn’t work—this was one of those things where you either kept moving forward or got lost forever in the dark. She didn’t even think it was a test, as such—just a weird ritual, or a passageway on the way to something else. A spell so vast, so intricate, it was a realm.

Patricia took another step, and this time she was buried up to her mid-thighs and the “grass,” or whatever it was, was scratchy and awful. The sweetness was getting intoxicating, like an incense with something narcotic mixed in.

She walked forward and downward, letting the potpourri consume her waist, then her belly, then her torso and shoulders. At last she was in it up to her neck, and her head was swimming from the perfumey sugary air. Instinct made Patricia want to take a deep breath before her next step, but Patricia trusted Carmen, as much as she trusted anyone anymore. She swung her foot forward and found nothing under it, other than loose crud.

Patricia took the last step, her head disappearing into the sharp fragrant rocks or broken glass or whatever, that scraped her face on the way down.

Rich-smelling bones and scraps buried her alive. Her feet touched a floor or the ground, and then it tilted, went sideways. She realized she was in a container that was being tipped. She opened her eyes, which she didn’t realize she’d closed, and she saw the inside of a Dumpster, full of lovely and rotten food, which was being emptied into a truck. Someone saw her squirming in the midst of all the garbage and gave a shout.

She spilled out of the truck, and the garbage collectors and the restaurant manager and a woman in a smart pink trench coat stared at her: a girl covered in restaurant waste, which no longer smelled sweet at all. She didn’t know if this was real or what city she was in, and her clothes were ruined and she was still barefoot and she couldn’t bear to look at her own grimy feet. They were all yelling but she couldn’t understand anything they were saying. She took off running, out of the secluded backstreet behind the restaurant and onto a bigger street where everybody stared at her.

She had only one thought: I have to get away from people.

Everything was too bright and tinged sort of blue-gray, like it was dusk and noon at the same time. She looked up to see where the sun was, but the whole sky was too bright to look at, and it stung her retinas.

This wasn’t the first time Patricia had been dropped in a strange town where she knew no one and had no money and did not speak the language. Even being shoeless and covered with stinking garbage was no great extra challenge—and yet she felt panic steal her breath. She was trapped, there were too many people wherever she went, they were all looking at her, faces looming and bulging, and some of them were trying to talk to her. Just breathing the same air as other humans made her feel like needles were being drilled into her skin. The idea of even touching another person’s skin made her retch—if anybody would even want to touch her, as filthy as she was.

The city—whatever city this was—pressed in on her. People came out of dome-covered wooden doorways, climbed through broken shop windows, rose up out of cars, and descended from high buses, pinning her down. Wherever she looked, faces and hands. Big staring eyes and grasping fingers, mouths gaping and making guttural roaring noises. Awful