New Decameron Thirty-Four: Ruthanna Emrys (Patreon)

Dinosaur, Roc, Peacock, Sparrow

By Ruthanna Emrys

Magic, I always believed, must have been bright as lightning. When you visit the old mountain caves, you feel it: miracles were worked there once. Chattering with classmates to cover the shivers, gazing up at the ancient handprints dancing among herds of bison and dragon, the thunder echoes in your bones. 

I feel the same thing when I mop the final room of the fossil exhibit. That late at night, I’ve already wiped down the trilobite display, swept between the not-quite mammals of the Triassic, made gleaming the marble beneath Jurassic titans. In the ice age I polish the glass protecting skeletons of sapiens and neanderthalis and mirabilis, dust the rail that stops toddlers trying to ride the giant sloth. 

And then I push my cart around that last corner. The fossilized roc spreads across the surface of cracked limestone, archaeopteran claws bowing from the tip of the one unbroken wing. The other wing is half gone, obliterated by the TNT that revealed this treasure within a new-delved reservoir over a century ago. Even so, you can see that the broken wing was broken in life, bent and ragged from whatever nemesis smashed it into the Pleistocene sediment. And, still, every visitor hears the thunder of its wings. Magic echoes long, and only the earliest writing hints at the power of the living thing. 

So the plaques beside the petrified roc left me utterly unprepared to break open an egg and find letters etched blood-red in the yolk. Sameia, they said: my name, and I discovered how great an echo might descend from the softest of whispers.

I stared at the letters, willing them to either vanish or reveal more, and when they did neither I sat hard on the floor. It was clean—I know my work—and smelled of mint and lemons and vinegar. I took in a deep breath of that ordinary air, held it, and pushed myself to my feet. The egg remained real. Beside the bowl, soft goat cheese and chopped scallions awaited some impossible decision. If they touched the egg would the strangeness spread, or would it collapse like the iridescence of a soap bubble?

My hands don’t shake after six hours of mopping and scrubbing, nor when I force myself to return to work after talking with my father, every tendon drawn tight against his disapproval. But my fingers came down twice on wrong contacts before I pressed them frantically against Chellan’s number.

“Sameia!” She boomed delight through the ether. She’s not supposed to take calls from the café, but she’s never behind on turning out fudge cookies frosted with megalodon faces, or cutting sandwiches into dinosaur shapes to delight toddlers, and no one gets on her case. “Is the bus giving you trouble? You need me to find you a ride?”

“Not the bus,” I said. Her voice was almost enough to distract me entirely. I imagined her broad shoulders and chest filling out her apron, the ridge of her forehead shadowing eyes gold as firelight in a cave. She’d have ideas, I knew. “What should I do with miracles in my kitchen?”

There was a pause as she presumably tried to parse this. I hadn’t explained myself well. I lowered the phone, took a picture, sent it before I could think better. Realized that egg-white still clung to my fingertips and put her on speaker while I washed. 

She didn’t, at least, ask if the picture was some kind of prank. I haven’t got that kind of humor in me, not enough sapiens to be any sort of trickster, and she’s never demanded it. “Is that the first one you’ve cracked from the batch?” 

I checked the cloverleaf basket with its concentric circles of eggs, and confirmed that I’d already used half a dozen earlier in the week. I like omelets, variation without unpredictability. I broke two more into a new bowl, found them illiterate. “The others are fine. It’s just… this one. Did I do something to it? Is it trying to do something to me? There has to be more than just the name. Instructions.” 

“Sameia.” Her saying my name felt complete. “It’s magic, isn’t it? It has to be.”

“It has to be something else,” I said. “There is no magic. Not since humans started planting, or writing, or whichever Great Shift theory they’re passing behind the walls this year.” The museum’s researchers worked in modular offices labyrinthed through the spaces between exhibits. The barriers were not so thick as they should be, and the anthropologists and geologists and paleontologists complained often of crowd-babble interrupting their tasks. After the visitors went home, someone who swept quietly could hear them arguing on the other side.

“If they don’t know how to bring magic back, how can they know what keeps it away?” she asked logically. “Nothing else is making your egg talk.”

“Should I show it to them?” I asked. They’d want to test it—or more likely, they’d assume it a prank in exactly the way Chelan didn’t. I wasn’t known, on the other side of those walls. “They’ll fire me, if they think I’m hoaxing them.”

“I think you should eat it.”

I stared at the blood-script letters. “That’s ridiculous. What if it never happens again? What if it’s dangerous?”

Her breathing shifted, deepening the way it did when she saw herself needed back at the oven. But she told me, “If it never happens again, it’s a fluke rather than a real change. If it’s dangerous, it’s still your danger by right. The rest of the message isn’t in the other eggs—if it’s anywhere at all, it has to be in doing something to this one.” Hearing my hesitation, she added. “Why don’t you bring it in today? I’ll help.”

#

My shift overlaps with Chellan’s by a bare hour: the first of my cleaning and the last of the café’s closeout, all as visitors finally abandon bones and potsherds for the golden dusk. It’s a time for efficiency, while administrators linger and researchers scoff at the idea of going home for dinner. Chellan, her kitchen gleaming, can dally without consequence once she’s done. That’s how we met: she would chat over the rail between the café and the rest of the grand foyer, telling me the day’s gossip and warning me of politics only visible to the day shift. 

I didn’t know then about the strangling, stretched-out divorce that awaited her at home, how grateful she was for company while I struggled to match her clever tongue. But I didn’t mind at all when she began following me into the exhibit halls, and we moved beyond work gossip to talking of our personal lives (or their lack), of our wishes for the future, of our private speculations about the museum’s most intriguing artifacts. 

I wouldn’t have minded more than friendship, either. But everyone knows that women who court women are like Chellan: peacockish as a man with her scarlet and sapphire velvets barely constrained under the plain apron, jewels dangling from the rounded points of her earlobes, words sparking like fireflies. Artless sparrows like me wait modestly on men’s notice—or try to avoid it. Chellan deserved someone more like her. Someone who did more in the world than cook omelets and make other people’s floors shine bright.

I worried that the letters would vanish. But I poured the egg from the bowl into a low mason jar, deft as poaching an egg, nestled it in my lunchbag cooled by an icepack, and clutched it level on the bus. I peeked before secreting it in my locker, and the script still whispered my name. 

Chellan hugged me tight, squeezing breath from my uncomplaining lungs, and we talked of other things while I worked as swiftly as I could. Finally we came to the golden hour when we could be confident that the administrators had gone home, and when I could claim myself on lunch break if caught. Chellan wasn’t supposed to let me eat in the café kitchen, of course, but she wasn’t the sort to get in trouble for anything.

I unscrewed the jar lid, looked again and confirmed that I hadn’t imagined things—or hadn’t only imagined. Chellan looked over my shoulder, whistled low. “Well, that’s deserving something special. I don’t think we should scramble it.”

“Fried, maybe? I could eat the yolk whole.” I was shivering again, afraid of what might happen. But I felt what she’d said, too: that this was mine, maybe more than anything else in the world had ever been mine. Even if I didn’t understand how it could fit with the broken-winged roc, or bison stampeding across cave walls. Maybe it was more of a kind with the handprints beside those bison, each recording an indelible life. 

Chellan began pulling out ingredients: butter, sweet onion, a block of parmesan, parsley and dill from the little herb bed under its grow-lights. From the refrigerated drinks case she rang up a tiny bottle of white wine, meant to fortify parents for the challenge of keeping their children off the megatherium.

She grated parmesan while I sliced the onion thin and fried it in butter. She poured in a little of the wine and it hissed steam; the scent became richer, tangier. I pushed the onion to the side as it browned, took a deep breath, and reached for the mason jar.

“Wow—any chance of one more for midnight snacks?” The voice startled me, and I snatched my hand back as if I could draw attention from the jar’s transgressions to my own. 

Chellan, more mindful, switched off the fire and moved the pan before turning around. “Didn’t your mom warn you against startling people near a hot stove? Someone’s gonna get burned.” She put her hand on her hip, ready to castigate or flirt as needed to deal with the intruder.  

They were one of the researchers, had to be, here this late and wearing the uniform of their tribe: jeans and a t-shirt printed with a roc, a t-rex, and an ostrich, arched over with the question, WHO’S IN YOUR FAMILY TREE?

“My mom didn’t tell me I’d find hot stoves at work after midnight. Sorry, the onions smelled amazing—I’m Johanji. What are you doing?”

“Frying an egg,” said Chellan. “Sorry, just the one—it’s Sameia’s lunch.”

Not offering Johanji anything was a little rude, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that they tried to peer around us at the jar. I pushed myself in front of them, realizing only as I did it that “the janitor tried to hide her lunch” wasn’t going to do me any favors if they felt like mentioning it tomorrow. They gave me a look like I’d just panicked at the thought of someone seeing my food. “Please tell me you’re not doing anything that’s going to blow up. Let’s leave that to the chemists.”

And the look I gave Chellan must have said ‘I don’t think it’ll blow up’ a little too clearly, because Johanji pushed past me and then stared, mouth rounded in something like wonder.

“Chellan’s trying a new decorating technique,” I said hurriedly. “It’s beet dye.”

“Tell it to one of the old guard upstairs,” said Johanji, “and they might believe you. They’d want to. How did you do it? How long have you…?”

I felt my shoulders, clenched against discovery, sag. Of course, this was scientific evidence, not my personal miracle. They’d want to take it, subject it to the sort of studies that I’d once been expected to take up. The egg wasn’t really mine; it was meant for some other version of me, one who’d listened to her parents.

“It’s Sameia’s,” said Chellan, more quietly than I thought she was capable of but no less firmly. “It’s her magic. It has her name on it. You want to watch, fine, but you can’t take it off to study.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Johanji. “I just want to see how it’s done. And maybe…”

“Maybe what?” I asked, still suspicious. 

“You understand how many theories this breaks?”

“I know agriculture hasn’t gone anywhere,” I said. I glanced at the onions, but the butter had stopped spitting and we’d managed not to burn them.

Johanji waved their hand dismissively. “That’s an old one. The hot theory for the past ten years is the Triumvirate Hypothesis—you know it?”

I shook my head, and Chellan said, “That dungbowl priest who tries to tell people who to marry, right?”

“That’s the ‘spiritual’ side of it.” Johanji made a spitting gesture with two fingers, fortunately not following through with the real thing like some people I knew. “The scientific side is—well, you know how a lot of people would look at the three of us.” 

I saw it right away: Chellan’s brow and eyes, my sharp-boned face and sharp-tipped ears, Johanji’s rounded lobes and rich brown skin. “One of each kind.”

“Sure. And if they were even more ignorant, they’d assume I was clever and untrustworthy, that you’re some unworldly artist or scholar, and your friend must be patient and hardworking and a little bit slow.”

“They’ve got the hardworking part right,” said Chellan, warning in her tone.

“I said they were ignorant,” said Johanji. “That’s all based on superficial phenotype, and it’s complete bullshit. All modern humans get about a third of their DNA each from neanderthal, plains-ape, and fae, and the range of looks comes from less than one percent variance in that ratio. And even if the stereotypes were true prehistorically, which is extremely dubious, you wouldn’t be able to tell someone’s brain from the shape of their ears.”

“I’m putting you on the line next time my dad calls,” I said. 

Johanji cocked their head, looking very much the scavenging trickster for a moment. “To tell him he’s ignorant?”

It was more tempting than it should have been. “Maybe not.”

“In any case, the Triumvirate Hypothesis takes modern genetics as a given. The core claim is that when the kinds first mixed together, it produced magic as an epiphenomenon. That makes sense to a lot of people, because most of the resonant artifacts and fossils we have are from about that time period—between the first art and the first writing. The idea is that magic came from some sort of dynamic tension among different types of minds in close proximity. People like the Reformers take that several steps further and over a cliff, and think that if you breed like with like, you’ll start pulling the kinds apart again. Then, boom, magic comes back, their god brings the apocalypse, they go off to paradise—all of which makes even less sense than the original theory, but gives them really terrible politics.”

I tried to work my head back around to where we’d started. “My egg proves them wrong?”

“Given that we haven’t increased the variance in human genetics, I’d say so. But it does fit with what I’ve been thinking.”

“Which is what?” asked Chellan. Still suspicious, still close enough to have my back no matter what Johanji did next.

They tapped their t-shirt. “I don’t think the magic ever went away.”

I blinked. “If it was still here, we’d know. I mean, people outside this room would know. There’d be rocs.” I imagined it sometimes, mopping: those thunderous wings breaking free of their limestone prison, taking to the sky.

“We said for a long time that dinosaurs went extinct. And there aren’t Tyrannosaurs or ankylosaurs any more. But we—the paleontologists, I mean, not me personally—discovered that even though most lines were lost, theropods evolved into birds. And now we understand that a sparrow is a dinosaur.” They pointed up in the general direction of the fossil exhibit, and the corner with the roc. “T rex.” And then behind me, at my egg. “Sparrow. I don’t want to stuff and mount it. I do want to look at the living thing.”

I hesitated. Some of that was fear of trying to perform, and disappointing my observer. Chellan, at least, knew better than to hope for gaudy plumage on anything I did—if I didn’t excite her, at least I wouldn’t fail to live up to expectations. What did Johanji want, from sparrow magic? 

But some of my hesitation was what they’d said: that I wasn’t a failure just because my life didn’t match the supposed potential in my face. I wanted to believe that. I wanted to like Johanji for saying that, even though there was nothing personal in their scholarly opinions. And I wanted, impossibly, time to think about it separately from this strange new thing.

“You can look,” I said at last. “But you can’t publish, or talk to your colleagues, without consulting us. It’s ours.” And was startled by the broad, grateful smile Chellan flashed in my direction. 

I heated the pan, summoning again the scent of browning onions. I gripped Chellan’s hand once, quickly, for courage, then took the mason jar and tipped its contents oh so carefully into the sizzling butter. The white spread to capture the onions; the yolk stayed whole. I sprinkled parmesan like a dusting of snow, flecked the white with dill and parsley. I slipped the spatula beneath, loosening where the egg threatened to stick, and watched anxiously for the albumen to solidify. So many eggs I’d fried in my life, and that part always took longer than expected.

As the egg cooked, the whisper intensified—never a shout, never a lightning strike, but something stirred a sense I couldn’t name. I felt it in my bones and belly. The words dissolved across the yolk, and Chellan gasped, but I could still sense the magic. I could sense the mine of it, so strongly that I wondered how I could have doubted. I smiled at her, nodded reassurance, and glanced back at Johanji to see them watching intently, taking everything in without judgment.

At last the white was cooked through, browning a little at the edges and wreathed with onions. Chellan found me a chair and snatched plate and fork from their cabinets—needs we’d forgotten until that point—and I slid the perfectly-fried egg onto the plate, yolk still whole. 

I ought to have felt self-conscious about eating. But the whisper filled the part of me that usually feared others’ reactions, and my first sliver of white tasted like onions and petrichor and an ochre-stained palm pressed against the wall of a cave. I nibbled around the edge, savoring. Then, finally, I lifted the yolk and placed it in my mouth. It broke, flooding my tongue with salt and savory—and with my name. 

It felt like cleaning behind a table too-long unmoved, and finding a childhood treasure that I’d forgotten owning. The whisper was in me now, not a message to which my name had been the opening, but everything that was already in the name. Long-buried memories of people calling me, before I learned to flinch at the sound. The way I’d always liked the pleasure of restoring patterns, and the unhurried appreciation of beautiful things. The swirl of ancestry descending into my whole body, beyond my elvish face: the steady back, strong lungs built for endurance rather than speed, muscles that took a long time to build up but held firmly to their strength once gained. 

It was a glimpse of myself directly, without comparison or the filter of others’ opinions. Or more than a glimpse: like my lungs and muscles, my mind knew how to hold on. I swallowed, and breathed in ordinary air, and didn’t lose what I’d taken in. 

I looked around, wondering without fear what the others had seen. Johanji was watching with widened pupils—something, at least, must have been perceptible outside the confines of my head. Chellan knelt beside me, gazing up. It was a strange perspective, and it occurred to me that a sparrow isn’t a failed peacock. 

“Can I kiss you?” I whispered. Light glinted from her earrings and her eyes. For answer her lips parted in wonder, and she pulled me to meet them. Something surged between us, all the lightning I could have wanted—though I doubted anyone but us could feel the thunder. No one else needed to.

I drew away at last to find Johanji carefully examining the block of parmesan. I hadn’t worried about whether they were looking at all. I kept hold of Chellan’s arm and asked them, “What are you going to do with what you’ve learned?”

They turned back, wearing the smile people get when they think something is funny and sweet. “Some of that will depend on you. But first, I need more cases—and now, I know what to look for.”

“And the people who think they know us just from our looks,” said Chellan. “This is going to upset them, right?”

“They’ll hate it,” said Johanji. “They’ll try to deny it. But even if you’re planning for rocs, a thousand sparrows are hard to ignore.”

I looked at Chellan again, read her approval. “We’ll help.”

#

Late that night, I pushed my cart around the last corner of the fossil exhibit. The roc stretched its wing wide in the dim light, broken but still echoing thunder. 

“You’re family, too,” I whispered. I blew it a kiss, a promise of fondness and remembrance. A promise that I knew it now—as I’d try to keep knowing myself—daughter to dinosaurs, and mother to peacocks and sparrows.

***************************************************

"What a great world! I wish we could go to that museum and see the Roc, wow."

"Fried egg with onions and your name on?" he offers her the plate. The yolk reads Maya in neat red italics. She takes it, delighted. 

"Mmm, those onions are great," she says, tucking in. Then she notices. "You're not eating?"

"No name," he says, and shrugs. "Oh well. I should have grabbed the omelette while I had the chance.."

"You really don't have a name?" she asks. 

"No... you can give me one if you want. Then I'd have a name in your story."

Maya eats the yolk, and while she doesn't feel magic shooting through her, it does taste great. She considers whether to give him a name, and then, thinking about the story, as she swallows shakes her head. "I don't want to change you and limit you," she says. 

"Up to you," he says. "Shall we read some more? Or do you need to wash your hands and run around a bit?"

They go to the bathroom, and then race around the library. The cat sits in a square of sun washing his ears and watches them disdainfully as they pass. They collapse back into their chairs, and he picks the next book off the top of the pile.

"Selected Afterimages of the Fading, by John Chu," he says. "Chu won the short story Hugo a few years ago."

And they read.