Chapter One
"Drink your smoothie," Mother told me. I see her standing by the window smoking cigarettes one after the other. She is tall and yellow-haired, thinner than she ought to be and kind of mean-looking. She speaks in a growl and everything's about her laws and orders. She has a lot of rules and bosses me around. She would like to run the world. She says she could do a better job than the fools who do it now. She says it's a miracle with all the fuck-ups and failures that we're still right where we should be, at the top of the food chain killing everything. She likes her knives. She likes her tools. She especially enjoys her guns.
I went to school every single day from the age of six until the age of sixteen and then I was done with that. School was a cement-block room in the side yard with a shiny tin roof that pinged in the rain. We had lunch in the same room too, all of us kids together all day long. Our teachers were named Elephant Man and Snotty McSnotch. They taught mostly through straws. Most of what I learned tasted like chocolate. All in all the whole school thing took around eleven weeks human time or so I'm told. Joker Variety was the stupid one who pointed his straws in the wrong direction. Spitballs were his favorite topic. He said he had a big muscle on his arm that came from being bitten by a snake. He said that Chinese was a song you had to play before a football game. He said that fences were money.
"I can get you a dozen," Mother tells Mrs. Blather, who doesn't seem to believe her.
"I can get you a dozen by noon," Mother insists.
"Noon tomorrow," she adds.
"Twelve noon sharp."
I can hear bit and pieces of Mrs. Blather's side of things. She sounds like a nice old lady. She giggles every now and then. I don't know why. She says things like "practicality" and "intermediaries" and "cover your tracks", and she laughs. Mother doesn't laugh.
"Don't be a birdbrain," she tells me.
Mother is more difficult to understand than a housefly.
Mother says I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and she has a lot of knives. She says I am a "piss-poor student" and “she's had better”. She was always on me about "time management" and "poor choices" and how it was "time to settle down". I knew all about settling down. This is after you're done with school and you have to let it all "soak in". They really mean that. First you have all those Nurture Smoothies to get the experiences and the influences absorbed into the body and the brain, and then it all gets sorted out over time until (presto!) you're all grown up. She never let me forget for a minute that I was an investment and I'd better "pan out" or else. She enjoyed comparing me to the rest of the batch.
"That Parsnip Caravan," she'd say, "she turned out pretty nicely, dontcha think?"
"Sure," I muttered. I hated Parsnip Caravan. All my life it was Parsnip Caravan this and Parsnip Caravan that. She was the ten on the scale. She was the "ninety-five percent" to get picked first. She was, well, you get the picture. Everyone has a Parsnip Caravan their mother compares them to, don't they? I'll bet even their mother compares them to somebody else who's better than they are.
"I could get a hundred kay for Parsnip Caravan," Mother said.
Mother didn't think she could get a hundred kay for me. Naturally, the Nurture Smoothies don't teach you what is really going on at all. I learned a lot of other things from Midgerette.
Midgerette says that fences are chairs and she can stand on any that are wide enough, but she is not the kind of bird that can perch up on a wire. You needed special feet for that and Midgerette is a water bird. Midgerette doesn't like glass because it's a trick. She says that babies grow up believing whatever their parents believe and that seagull-people have their own religions too. There are some who believe in the wind gods and some who worship the rain. Midgerette says the cliffs are worn away slowly and her people have stories about the time the ocean was much farther away from the hills than it is now. Silly gull-people, she told me, believe that the ocean is coming to eat up the hills and it's only a matter of time. Others believe the hills are running away and can never be caught. They like what people-people say about the stars, about how many there are and how far away, but they're not sure if all that's just make-believe. Gull-people know about the moon and the tides and the sun and the seasons and they know about distance and time. Midgerette just thinks it's pretty much "fifty percent" that our calculations about the universe itself are correct. Folder the squirrel once said that you get to the next world by climbing a tree.
I think he meant a particular tree.
Anthills are green and blue if you're an ant.
So much depends on how you experience the world. To see it only one way is a lot like being blind.
People-people like to think that some birds sing beautiful songs while other birds not so much, and bird-people tend to agree, only each one thinks its own songs are the good ones. I met a red-winged blackbird who was totally convinced of this, and I also met a robin who felt the same way. Midgerette says it's bigotry. She's the smartest people I know. On the other hand, Mother says it's all just a bunch of noisy noise and if I don't shape up she's going to close the shutters and turn out the lights. Then I'll know she means business.
"People-people are born for money," Midgerette told me. "Then they live for money. If it isn't about money, it isn't a thing. There's sellers and there's buyers. The buyers are also sellers only they do something called 'value-adding' in between. Every people-person has to have a 'skill', which is their special way of 'value-adding'. They take something, value-add to it, then sell it. Do you see?"
I did not see, not at first. What Midgerette knew, and tried many times to explain until I finally got it, is that there are two different kinds of people-people; some are born, and some are grown. Mother was born. I was grown.
"Their kind come out different," Midgerette said. "That's the only way we can tell for sure. They comes out of bodies and you others come out of a box. Also the grown ones grow a lot faster. Gull-people only come out of a box, a little round one, but we grow even faster than you. It takes a lot of squawking for us to get all the learning done. Your kind suck it in through straws."
"I don't think I have a skill," I told her. "Except I can draw."
"That's nothing, honey," Midgerette told me. "There's no selling in that. Anyway, you're the thing that gets sold."
"Me?"
I guess I really was a piss-poor student. Even Midgerette got tired of explaining everything to me.
"Then what happens?" I wanted to know, but Midgerette couldn't tell me that. Whoever bought me was going to value-add to me and then sell me again. That's all she knew. She was sorry about it. She'd gotten to like me, she said. She'd been coming around every morning every day for a while. I was a part of her life. She'd never had a favorite people-person before, she said.
"You're bigger than your mother now," she told me.
"I am?"
"You're stronger than your mother is too," she said.
"Okay," I said. I didn't know what she was going on about.
"You could easily kill her," Midgerette said. "I can show you how. There's lots of ways to do it."
"Do I have to kill her?" I asked.
"No," Midgerette said. "You don't have to, but you can if you want to."
I knew a little about killing. That was more Nature than Nurture, though. The Nurture Smoothies focused on the good things, like being nice and polite, doing what you were told to do, speaking only when spoken to, forgiving and being full of love especially for your mother. Nurture Smoothies taught you how to be happy under any conditions, how to accept your fate with joy, how to do calculations and how to draw, how to process lots and lots of information and be able to answer questions succinctly. I could tell you percentages all day and all night. That's one reason why Midgerette and I became friends. At first she was only "forty percent" we'd get along but I told her I was "sixty six percent" and told her why. She was impressed with my computations.
Nature is unavoidable though. There's a core of fear in life, expressing itself in many ways, like anxiety, hatred and meanness. There's just no life without it. Midgerette said it's a good thing she can't hear fish because otherwise she could never eat them, and then what would she do?
“French fries don't grow on trees,” she said. “Only people-people eat all the other kinds of animals. They do it because they're cruel and they have fear.”
“They don't really need to do it, but face it,” Midgerette said, “people-people are killers. So it's within the rules to kill them back," she said. "Don't worry about it."
Was I worried about it? I didn't know if I should kill Mother or not. Nurture said no and Nature said maybe. I had to think about it some more. I also thought there had to be another way. There is always more than one of those. Midgerette didn't think it was such a big deal.
“Your kind go around hurting each other all the time,” she said. “From what I've seen there's a lot of coming and going and buying and selling and talking and yelling and bunching up and splitting away. We can never decide if your kind are more raven or crow. You want to be in a pair and you also want to be in a big group, and every time you're in a big group it breaks up the pairs, and every time you're in a pair you just go and join a big group. Gull-people know what we are. All other kinds of people know what they are. It's you guys can't figure it out.”
Still I didn't want to kill mother. Maybe I could just run off. She wouldn't miss me for at least a few hours. That's how it was when I was going to school. She would check me off her list in there and come back for me later. In the meantime there was drinking and naps. We had Tangerine Smoothies for kindness, Lemon-Lime Smoothies for obedience, Strawberry Smoothies for entering data, and Pineapple to process it all. Chocolate was my favorite, even though it was funny that you didn't even know what Chocolate was until you had a Grapefruit because that's where you learned about the food groups.
“Just stab her in the neck,” Midgerette advised. “With one of those super sharp knives. Then she'll see who's the sharpest.”
“Won't you stop it?” I asked her. “I'm ninety percent that I'm not going to do that. I have other ideas.”
She was miffed.
“Suit yourself, but don't come running to me when she grabs you by the throat and drags you out.”
Midgerette flew off. I knew she'd come back because she always did. Gull-people never stay in one place very long. Besides, there was a breeze and there was nothing she liked better than to soar along the cliffs in a nice crazy wind.