Rare Earth

Felicity Shoulders and Leslie What

 

 

 

 

Callum and his friend Juarez pushed in between commuters on the MAX train. A guy in a pirate hat frowned at Callum’s saxophone case, but most people’s eyes skipped over them—Juarez was made up in green-face for a zombie flashmob, and Portlanders tried to be too cool to react. There was enough weirdness to keep them busy not reacting: it was the day before Rose Festival started, an excuse for people to act crazy, if they needed an excuse. They’d even seen a guy wearing a turtle shell, which Juarez swore had something to do with the slow food movement. Juarez wore a camo jacket with his dad’s name, “Juarez,” stitched across the pocket. Callum’s coat was from his dad too, black motorcycle leather, inherited.

They had been downtown where Callum had been playing his sax for spare change. The light rail train started moving east toward the Burnside Bridge and home.

“How much did you make?” Juarez said. “Enough for a latte?”

“You know I’m saving my money.” Callum examined the coins he’d scooped out of his sax case. “Here, you take half.”

“All I did was meditate.”

“Zombie Zen is performance art.”

“Well, here.” Juarez shoved a big bag of venison jerky at his friend. “From my dad.”

Callum dug into the jerky. His grandma had slipped a snack bag into his coat like he was a toddler, but he wasn’t about to eat it. Peanuts and raisins older than he was, and a rock. She’d collected a shitload of these McNugget-sized things over the years, old and weird with translucent skins and blue veins inside. Like Grandma. He called them her crazy moon agates. They sure weren’t edible.

Juarez pointed out the window at the carnival rides on the waterfront. “You going to the Rose Festival this time?”

“Always. Gotta take Grandma Vera.”

“Pobrecito.” Juarez pouted exaggeratedly. “You want to come over for dinner? Homemade tamales.”

“Thursday’s pizza night. Besides, the Mommandant thinks I’m at home babysitting Grandma.”

“Or the other way around.” Juarez grinned, a bit ghoulish with his smeared makeup and dangling fake eyeball. He ducked off the MAX at his stop, and Callum scribbled in his spiral notepad for the last few minutes of the ride. Parasitic, he wrote. Copacetic.

 

Grandma Vera’s front door was blown open. The living room curtains were closed and the room dark except for Fox News on the TV. Callum left his sax in the foyer and rushed inside. “Grandma?” he called. “You here?” He imagined her wandering around barefoot, in her old night-gown. “Grandma!” he called, and didn’t breathe until he saw her toddle out of the kitchen and switch on a light.

“You’re just in time for snack.” The side of her lip was caught under her false teeth, giving her a goofy smile. She had trouble accessing the part of her brain that told her what to do next. RAM, he wrote on his spiral pad. Ramnesia. She was holding a Pyrex bowl of peanuts and raisins. He led her to the cleared spot at the dining room table.

“You shouldn’t walk around in the dark. You could trip,” Callum said. Grandma’s house was choked with clutter, stuff Vera called “ephemera” and his mom, Lily, called “fire hazard.” Rolled maps, cardboard boxes of old ration coupons and death certificates, stocks from companies even Wikipedia had never heard of. Civil War uniform buttons she called “undug.” Only the upstairs, where Lily and Callum had lived since his dad died, was clear. Vera had owned an antique shop in the Pearl District before it got fancy, but now she sold her stuff online. Except lately, she mostly bought things and forgot to sell. Her eBay feedback hovered around 34 percent positive. “Bid on Life magazine, got toaster,” one bidder had posted.

“I know where everything is,” she scoffed. She picked at the raisins, offered him some from her hand. He pretended to eat and hid them in his pocket with the others. She was wearing a butt-ugly velveteen choker with one of her crazy moon agates glued in the center. “That’s different,” Callum said.

“Charles gave it to me,” she said, and looked off into the distance.

Lily shouldered the door open and yelled, “How many times have I told you not to leave your instrument on the floor?” but she was carrying a pizza box and it smelled like garlic and pepperoni, so Callum got up to give her a hand.

“Would you set the table?” Lily said, waving him away. Her face was puffy, her voice tight. “What’s that thing around your neck, Mom?” She flopped open the pizza, her half Veggie Nirvana and theirs Omnivore Bliss. Thank God she’d gotten over veganism, because a pizza without cheese was just wrong. Lily didn’t say another word until they had finished the pizza and thrown away the paper plates. Of course the word was “homework.”

Grandma picked up the remote to change channels. Not the usual news-bots. Yellow balls of light bobbing across a meadow. More exciting than static, but not by much. “Turn up the sound,” she said. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

Lily took the remote and switched off the TV. “Homework,” she repeated, and Callum retreated upstairs.

 

He woke up to the Dandy Warhols on his old CD-alarm and Mom retching in their shared bathroom. She still hadn’t admitted she was knocked up. She was delusional to think she could hide it. This was middle school biology, not rocket science.

He hesitated outside the bathroom door, imagining Lily coming up with some lie to explain her morning barf ritual, maybe slandering last night’s pizza. Why did she need another kid anyway? Not like she was doing such a great job with him.

He decided to skip showering and get out while he could. After a kitchen raid, he walked to Hawthorne, inhaling the last quantum particles of Pop-Tart as the bus pulled up. He flashed his pass to the driver. The bus was almost empty, except for a Bible-bot finger-reading psalms in the front seat and a girl named Abby Reeves from AP English near the back. Abby wrote sestinas and dyed her hair the shade of a blue jay’s wing. Callum sloped toward the seat across from her.

He gave her a sideways nod, and balanced his notebook on the end of his sax case. Incognito. Inamorata, he scribbled.

The bus trundled off into light traffic. The sidewalks were all ghost town. Too quiet for a Friday morning.

Abby hooted, and he saw she was grinning. She shook her phone. “School’s canceled!” She walked across the aisle, and fell into the seat next to him. Her bag slumped over his sax case. “Callum, right? I’m Abby.”

The bus stopped on a red, long enough to read a newspaper box headline: “STRANGE GLOBAL PHENOMENA.”

Thanks, Oregonian, he thought. That explains things. “What’s up with school?”

“Canceled because of Martians,’ ” she said.

Usually she ignored him, so why was she playing him now? “Are you serious?”

“Sometimes,” she said. She pulled a netbook from her bag. Her camisole flashed enough boob to observe with peripheral vision. Abby tapped in CNN.com and turned the screen toward him. Her arm bumped his. Balls of light like on the TV, only red and swarming along some street in Idaho, overlapping, rising and falling like a stream. “OFFICIALS CALL FOR CALM,” scrolled below the image. “4 DEAD IN POCATELLO.”

“Wow,” he said. An alien invasion called for something more intelligent than “wow,” but all the good words were on his spiral pad and not in his head. “How’d the people die in Pocatello?”

“They were fried to death. Apparently the aliens shoot lightning if you try to touch them.”

“I always thought there’d be flying saucers and ray guns,” he said. “Take me to your leader stuff.”

“Nope, no War of the Worlds. They just popped up in Europe, Asia, everywhere. Different colors, but no one knows why, or where they’re going.”

“What do they want?”

“Maybe they don’t want anything,” she said. She reached across him for the stop cord. “Maybe floating around is all they do. Anyway, what do you wanna do today?”

“Good question,” Callum said, worried she’d suggest something that cost money.

“Let’s hang out,” she said, and stood. He followed her from the bus, walrus-graceful lugging his saxophone and backpack. He tried to fall into step, though his stride was a foot longer.

“I go to this rehearsal space to chill,” Abby said. She threw him a look. “Write poetry. Vocalize, sometimes.”

He knew this street. They’d be passing Sid’s Music. “Okay if we check something out first?”

“Onward,” she said.

He walked ahead and felt dumb for forgetting to hold open the door. Sid looked up from behind his desk, where he was watching green balls of light dance across his portable TV. He wore a Mariners hat, a jersey with “Ichiro” across the back, and a sour expression. “Game’s supposed to be on,” he said.

Callum pointed to the tenor sax hanging on the wall.

Sid carefully handed it down. “No change: no rent, no layaway, no pity discount,” he said.

“It’s gorgeous,” Abby said, touching the mother-of-pearl keys and the feather tracery on the bell.

The lacquer was stripped in places but that didn’t matter. “It’s two thousand dollars,” Callum said. “All the great jazz saxophonists played tenor.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, not in a mean way.

Callum fingered a few bars, listening to the hollow thudding and clacking of the voiceless sax. In a while he said, “Let’s go,” and laid the shining instrument on the countertop. “Thanks, Sid.”

“Come back when you have money.”

The rehearsal space was around the corner, in a rundown building papered with gig announcements and offers for lessons. Abby pulled open the door, held it until he was inside. It smelled of old carpet glue, pot smoke, maybe a little cork grease. Candles and the glow of laptop screens instead of overhead fluorescents. A couple of figures lounged on the beat-up old furniture. Callum got out his phone to text Juarez, ignored two missed calls from his mom.

“ . . . blowing it out of proportion. Obviously there are bound to be other species in the universe. Don’t be humanocentric.” Some guy, hunched over his laptop in the corner—Lex, king of the stoners.

“Anthropocentric,” Meg from band said. She was one of those obnoxious kids who owned and played four different instruments.

“Hey,” Abby said, taking off her coat. “Meet Callum. I rescued him from the 14 bus.” She squeezed two chairs together, and motioned for him to sit.

“Boing Boing calls them lightning attacks. Says they only happen around high-tension power lines. The aliens probably don’t even mean to do it,” Lex said.

“That’s bogus. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve been consuming rare earth minerals, like the ones China’s been stockpiling,” Meg said.

“Cerium, used in fluorescents,” said Lex, proving only that he was a fast Googler. “Dysprosium, used in reactors. Neodymium for lasers. We need this shit or there’s no technology. They eat all our rare earth, we’ll revert to cavemen.”

Callum scribbled, Rare Earth. In the dark room it was hard to focus. Abby leaned her shoe onto his boot.

“You guys worried?” Abby asked.

“No,” Meg said. “I can live without my computer.” She lit a bong, passed it around.

Abby shook her head and said, “Not right now,” so Callum passed, too. She pointed to the sax case, said, “Wanna play something?”

“Yeah, go for it,” Lex said.

The horn always took a couple of minutes to warm. Callum held the neck and tried not to think of Abby and the way her slender arms crossed under her B-cups as she leaned in to watch. The space was small and he played as softly as he possibly could so he wouldn’t blast her away, his version of Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain.”

When he finished, Lex said, “That’s dope.”

Meg stifled a yawn, and said, “I’m more of a rocker chick,” and he thought, yeah, I bet you are, you stuck- up little shit.

Abby rested her hand on Callum’s arm. “That helped,” she said. “It’s crazy to think about an alien invasion. I mean, we’re still in high school.”

“Crazy,” he said. Grandma Vera coped by ignoring the obvious while Mom couldn’t stop worrying about everything. Grandma Vera’s way had its merits. “Don’t think about it,” he said, which must have been a good thing to say, because she oonched closer.

Meg stood, and set the bong against the wall behind a chair. “Rose Festival?” she said.

“Maybe later,” Abby said.

“See you there,” Lex said, and walked out with Meg, letting the door bang shut.

Abby’s hand was still on his arm. Callum found himself looking into her left eye, then her right, unable to meet both at once. Better than staring at her boobs, but still psycho. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, but then it wasn’t.

The door swooshed open and it was his mother, glistening with rage and raindrops. “When school is over, you come home,” she said. “That’s doubly true when school is canceled because of a national emergency.”

“Oh God, Mom,” was all Callum could say.

“I knew you’d go to Sid’s and moon over that stupid instrument, and he knew you kids would be up to no good and hanging around here,” she said. She was dressed for collecting insect samples in the field, galoshes and mud-streaked overalls under the poncho.

“Mom,” he said. “Be cool.”

“Cool?” she said, waving her plastic-tented arms in prophetic frenzy. “There are aliens over Coeur d’Alene. There are aliens over Ashland and Olympia and Bend. There are aliens coming here.” As if she hadn’t embarrassed him enough, she switched to her sarcastic tone and said, “I don’t think I’ve met your friend, Callum.”

“My mom does this, too,” Abby whispered, and they traded understanding glances.

“Abby Reeves,” he said, “meet my mom, Lily Fitzpatrick. Mom, meet Abby. Abby edits our school literary magazine,” he said, because his mom couldn’t always look at a person and know she was about more than her hair.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. F.”

Lily’s eyes swept with practiced suspicion over the broken-down chairs, the amp, the magazines on the coffee table, and stopped on the centimeter of bong peeking out from behind a chair.

“There were other people here,” Callum said. “We weren’t smoking.”

“This time,” Lily said, but at least she believed him.

“Can I give you a ride anywhere, Ms. Reeves? I’m sure you have parents who care enough to worry.”

“No thanks, Mrs. F. I’m good.”

They stood, faced each other.

Abby slipped a folded slip of paper into Callum’s palm and said, “Later.” She waved goodbye and flowed around his mom into the rain.

He was left alone with his kick-drum heart and his motionless mother.

“Car, Callum. Now.”

 

She drove faster than usual. Callum adjusted his sax case so it didn’t squinch his boot against the door.

“They’re really coming, Callum. I heard it on the news.”

“I thought they were in Idaho,” he said.

“They’re all over, not that you’d know. You see a pretty girl, who cares about aliens?”

Callum actually thought he saw her pull a smile. He unfolded Abby’s paper and read the ten digits and the cursive scrawl, “Text me.” He switched the stereo on, found it tuned to NPR.

“Leave the dial alone,” Lily said. She didn’t usually protest when he tuned her out with music.

“ . . . time it does seem clear that the phenomena, widely considered extraterrestrial creatures, will converge over Northwest Oregon. Area residents are encouraged to evacuate calmly, and to lessen traffic congestion through use of carpools,” said Kristian Foden-Vencil, OPB News. “FEMA recommends keeping a safe distance from the aliens. Should they approach you, abandon any smartphones, computers or other electronic appliances, which may attract the beings. Severe burns and electrical shock may result from physical contact.”

Lily shut off the radio. “Jeez,” she said. “I can’t take this. It really would take the end of the world to separate you from your phone.”

Callum programmed in Abby’s number and gave her a ringtone he’d pay attention to.

“We need to focus,” Lily said. “Pick up Grandma Vera. Plan what to pack and where to go.” She chirped the horn at a Suburban stalled at the green light.

“Focus,” he said. “On what to pack.” Like Lily was any good at that. Her closet was full of boxes of Dad’s clothes. Dad’s books. Dad’s tools. You could bring the past with you but it didn’t make it any less past.

The sky was dark with clouds. “Finally,” Lily muttered as she turned onto their gravel driveway. “Now let’s get Grandma and get out. Go pack. Hurry.”

He moved the sax case to the trunk and dragged the backpack up the steps behind Lily.

“Grandma!” she bellowed. “Time to go.”

Callum trudged up to his room, and replaced his Spanish and biology texts with the Tao Te Ching, found his dad’s Kershaw blade, bottled water to wash down Juarez’s dry venison. He wadded up underwear and socks, tee shirts, jeans. He opened the plastic file box where he kept his notebooks, dropped photos and sheet music onto the shifting heap of spiral-bounds, shut the box and wedged it under his arm. He gathered up batteries and ballpoints.

His mom had been slamming cupboards in the kitchen, but now it was quiet. Then a flash. Thunder. A cloudburst and an ocean of rain.

Callum stooped to look out the window at the sodden backyard and Lily running across the grass, toward the old garage where Grandma Vera stored a particularly rich deposit of clutter. Green light seeped from the open door. He was downstairs and out the back with his backpack before he could think about it. His shoes deepened the muddy dents Lily had left in the crabgrass lawn. “Mom,” he called, and heard her yell the same.

Lily was standing just outside the garage, like she couldn’t make herself step in. And there was Vera, enthroned in an old caned rocker, surrounded by six green spheres as big as volleyballs. They had steadily glowing cores the size of ping pong balls, surrounded by swirling color. Points glinted and faded on their borders.

Their light played on shelves piled with old boxes and broken trophies. Everywhere boxes overflowed with seashells, playbills, photographs ruined by mold. Grandma was holding a pickle jar full of her moon agates. She was all smiles, dressed in her Sunday clothes, hair Beetlejuice-frizzy.

Callum grabbed Lily’s clammy hand. “We have to do something,” he said.

The spheres rotated like electrons around Grandma Vera’s head. “Beautiful . . .” she murmured. She pursed her lips and made a humming noise that was not a melody or a background track or an Om. More the crackling, electric buzz of a cheap-ass amp.

Lily dropped his hand and started forward.

“Mom, what are you going to do?”

She stared at him, but didn’t answer.

“The radio said something about them liking technology. I’ll get my laptop. Maybe we can lure them off,” he said.

“Yes, go get something,” Lily said, and he turned back to the house, grateful to be doing something. Then his mom’s expression registered, the way she’d totally agreed with one of his suggestions without even looking for a way to shoot it down. He headed back.

Lily was in the garage now, blocking his view of Grandma. “Leave her alone,” she said, shrill above Vera’s gargling buzz. Callum saw her hand raised against the alien glow, then there was an explosive bang and Lily was thrown back onto the gravel.

“Mom,” he whispered. He knelt beside her, and bowed his head over her open, still mouth, straining to hear a word or a breath. He shouted, “Help!” but his grandmother didn’t even notice they were there.

 

It was Callum’s second ride in an ambulance. All that way with Dad on the gurney just to hear a doctor explain how sudden death was often the first sign of coronary artery disease. Callum remembered the beaten look on Lily’s face when she’d told him they were moving in with her mom. He felt guilty for hoping he didn’t live with his mother when he was forty. If he got to forty. Sometimes it didn’t seem like that would happen. He was holding Lily’s balled-up poncho. His dad had died in February, so he’d told the paramedics his mother was in her second trimester. There were two guys in EMT suits, one driving and the other EMT- ing. They crossed the Hawthorne Bridge into downtown.

The paramedic sitting beside his mom said, “She’s back,” and he saw his mom’s eyes flutter open, blood-shot. They were yellow-brown, which had never struck him as creepy before. Predator yellow. His hazel eyes, part hers and part Dad’s—were they scary, feral too? A line of raptor eyes stretching back along the generations. Dawn. Spawn, he wrote. Things your ancestors left behind that didn’t fit in boxes.

“You okay, Mom?” he asked, which was sort of stupid. She’d spent an hour unconscious.

Lily nodded. Her hair had gone frizzy, like Grandma Vera’s. They’d bandaged her right hand, burned where she’d touched the alien or it had zapped her, whatever you wanted to call it. Intravenous raindrops dripped into her other arm, accompanied by a steady, flashing light. The light froze, an alarm sounded and the paramedic fiddled with the IV pump. Lily’s hands and face were swollen, her skin stretched and pale. Even lying down, her belly was pretty obvious.

A motley mob spilled from the park blocks, stopping traffic. People carried signs: “The End Is Near,” always a classic; “Free beer in Valhalla.” A turtle guy brandished posterboard that said “TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN.” The windshield wipers threw gouts of rain off the glass. Callum heard a car horn nearby, brakes and metal crunching. The ambulance driver glanced back and said, “Just a fender-bender,” and kept driving. His uniform was dark under the arms.

“What’s happening?” Callum asked, and the driver gave him a better not to know kind of look.

“How’s she doing?” the driver asked. He was sweating.

The paramedic tending Lily said, “BP’s down. She’s alert and stable.”

The driver said, “Hospitals are closed to anyone who isn’t critical.” It was unclear if he was telling his partner or apologizing to Callum and Lily. He pulled into the downtown Fred Meyer lot. “We can’t take you home. We’ve got a hundred more emergencies all over town.” He slowed and whooped the siren, and the ambulance stopped beside an empty shopping cart corral. They pulled the IV, shrugged Lily into a wheelchair and lowered her to the asphalt.

“She’s going to be okay. You’d better take her home,” the driver said.

Lily said, “I want to lie down.”

Callum said, “It’s okay, Mom. We’ll go back to Grandma’s.” He slid the poncho over her head, hooked his backpack over the wheelchair handles and took hold of the grips. Lao Tzu had said, “To lead people, walk behind them,” so he led his mother through the lot. The door of a metallic green Beemer was open, displaying the asscrack of a tweeker tangled in wires from the dash. The tweeker noticed them, glared, managed to start the engine and weave his way toward Burnside. A couple of blocks down, there were pirates on the loose, a turtle guy and regulation street crazies. No buses went by. They passed an impromptu prayer circle. One of the prayercirclers broke off and hurried over to them, waving a plastic palm frond at Lily’s belly. “Look at you, at your age! Like Sarah and Hannah, blessed by God. Will you pray with us?”

“Take me home,” Lily said, her skin the color of non-fat milk. “Please.”

“You okay?” Callum asked. She wasn’t acting like the mom. And usually she’d be mad about the “at your age” thing.

She nodded, held up one finger and said, “Hold that thought.” She doubled over and threw up. The palm frond woman backed away.

“Good timing, Mom.” Callum said, and steered her east. They were still a long way from their side of the river.

“I feel better,” Lily said.

“Want something to drink?” Callum asked. He dug through his pack, located water.

“Got any food?” Lily said.

He hesitated. “Maybe a granola bar.”

“Something salty?” Lily said. “I want savory.”

“Savory,” he said. He hesitated. There was Juarez’s venison jerky, but maybe this wasn’t a day for vegetarianism. He offered her a thick strip from the bag. She mouthed it like a cigar to suck out the salt.

They passed by the 76 Station, and saw the gas monkeys had abandoned their posts. Customers were pumping their own gas, just like it was some other state, not Oregon. Two chicks ran by carrying Nordstrom bags overflowing with shoeboxes. One smiled at Callum and he couldn’t not notice how her boobs jiggled under her shirt.

A zombie flashmob had gathered at the corner of Third and Burnside. A dozen or so, dressed in a variety of tatters and crudely smeared green makeup. Lipstick painted on like blood drops. They did their zombie-mayhem thing and menaced some wasted pirates. One pirate ripped the stuffed parrot from his shoulder and pretended to eat it. Switching sides.

He wanted to write, Embrace the rot, but he kept pushing. The zombies limped their Frankenstein-monster walk toward the river.

Callum texted Abby. Where are you? He couldn’t tell if it went through. A tall zombie in a green coat staggered toward them, chomping his teeth. He broke character to clap Callum on the back. Juarez.

“Z’up, Callum?” Juarez said, “Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”

“Hey,” Callum said. “Don’t eat me.” He offered him the jerky and Juarez gnawed off a chunk of venison.

“Dude. I met your girlfriend. She’s tasty.” Juarez waved over a too pretty, blue- haired zombie, who staggered a bit, then dropped the act.

“Mrs. F. What happened to you?” Abby asked.

Lily said, “Struck by lightning.”

“Oh my god! Really?”

“Sort of,” Callum said, but she didn’t press, and he was glad, because he didn’t want to explain.

“The aliens are inside the city limits.” Abby said, wide-eyed.

“We know,” Callum said.

“We saw some at the Festival Village.”

“Kristian Foden-Vencil just interviewed some sciencetard on the radio,” Juarez cut in. “About how the aliens are zapping our asses. They eat rare earth and create magnetic energy fields.” Juarez smirked. “Magnetricity. They eat dirt, man, and they shit magnets. They are, like, totally alien.”

Abby said, “Rare earths are minerals—not dirt—and they’re using the rare earths to make magnetic mono-poles. Magnets with only one pole. Not north and south. Just north. Yin with no yang.”

“Or Yang with no yin,” Callum said. He liked how she wasn’t afraid to be smart.

“Dudes. This is cutting-edge crap,” Juarez said. “It’s not even in our physics text.”

“Our physics texts are thirty years old.” Callum said.

“This just doesn’t seem real,” Abby said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Callum said, watching a girl walk by on her hands.

“Any more jerky?” Lily said.

“I thought your mom didn’t eat meat,” Juarez whispered.

Callum shrugged and handed the bag to his mother. “We gotta get home and rescue Grandma Vera.”

“Oh,” said Juarez. He looked guilty. “I forgot to tell you something important.”

“What?”

“We saw your grandma down at the Village, playing Our Lady of the Alien Spheres. She looks like she’s wearing an electric Lady GaGa bubble dress. The aliens are all over her. But here’s the weird thing—she remembered me. She never remembers me. Wacktacular.”

Callum heard his voice getting high and tight, like Lily’s voice when she chewed him out. “That’s what’s weird? My grandmother is swimming in lightning-spitting aliens, and you’re all, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you’?”

Abby looked pale under her hastily applied green. “That old lady was Callum’s grandma?”

“You saw her, too?”

“I didn’t know you were related,” Abby said. “Sorry.”

“At least you don’t have to walk across the bridge,” Juarez said.

This is your brain on drugs, Callum thought, but he craved a smoke himself.

A guy at the back of the zombie flashmob chanted “Braaaaains” and on cue the zombies surged toward the river.

“Let’s find Grandma,” Callum said, swept up in the march of the undead.

 

Everything and everyone converged on the waterfront. A constellation of blue spheres spilled out from Stark Street. More unearthly glow, deep orange, on the Morrison Bridge. If you weren’t drunk or stoned you were scared. People were drinking and dancing out onto Naito Parkway. Most of the Rose Festival Village tents were knocked down, vendor stalls abandoned. The city was lit up with blue and red and gold.

Abby put her hand on Callum’s elbow. “How often does your grandma run away?”

“Not usually,” he said, distracted by her touch.

A male police officer stood guard while his lady partner cuffed a skeezy guy wearing only a glow-in-the-dark orange life jacket and unlaced Doc Martens boots. It was gross. Not something you wanted your mother or your girlfriend to see. Girlfriend. Hardly. Good thing she couldn’t read his thoughts.

“Callum,” Abby said. “Look.” She pointed to a bunch of men marching toward the main stage. They hoisted a woman on their shoulders with green spheres orbiting around her head.

Grandma Vera. She did look like Lady GaGa. Well, Lady GaGa’s grandma. Her legs were crossed demurely at the ankles and she was fingering her moon agate choker.

“Whoa,” Juarez said. “It’s like some mosh Aztec ritual. Like the Mother Goddess Coatlicue with her necklace made from human hearts.”

Grandma Vera’s handlers deposited her on a bed of plywood. One of the men presented her with a pickle jar before backing away. She rose slowly to her feet.

“Callum,” Lily said, her voice heavy somehow. “Help Mom.”

He didn’t want to let go of the wheelchair handles.

“I’ll stay,” Abby said.

Lily nodded her approval.

Juarez said, “Dude, I’m coming with you,” and the two boys pushed through the crowd, body-chucking anyone who looked too drunk to shove back. Sirens blared in the distance. You could smell beer and popcorn and dread. Usually the Festival night sky blazed with carnival rides and the streaking circle of the Ferris wheel, but tonight the sky bloomed with alien light. The rain had faded to a drizzle. Faces tipped from shadow to a warm green light.

Juarez aimed his phone to snap a picture. Onstage Grandma Vera pulled a moon agate from her pickle jar and held it up to the crowd. Her greenies surged upward, mimicking the motion of her hand. They wanted that moon agate.

The pickle jar was full of moon agates.

Callum did the math. Holy shit. Grandma Vera was screwed.

Juarez saw it, too. “Rare earth, dude. Maybe you can distract the aliens with my cell,” Juarez said, and slipped his phone into Callum’s pocket.

He had two cell phones. No way to know how many aliens that would feed. “Help me up,” Callum said, and Juarez laced his fingers together so Callum could climb to the stage. “Hey, Grandma,” he called. “It’s me.”

Grandma Vera ignored him.

Callum offered up the phones, but Grandma’s green spheres showed no interest. Maybe the aliens were finished with feeding and had moved on to another phase. Grandma Vera leaned over like she wanted to throw her moon agate into the audience. Seemed like a really bad idea. Callum reached out by instinct and stopped her by closing his hand over hers. The alien spheres widened their orbit until they were circling them both. Welcome to Grandma’s world, Callum thought. Great.

“Grandma,” he said. “It’s Callum. I need you to give me that moon agate thingy.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “These look like agates but they’re much more special.” She relaxed her veiny hand in his, and his fingers closed around the not-agate. “Your grandfather and I bought out every rock hound in the Gorge. We didn’t know what they were, but I liked them.” She dipped her free hand into the jar and came out with four more not-agates, five.

Blue aliens streamed across the broken tents and the sparse police line, into the crowd. They floated over the outstretched hands of zombies, steampunks and children, drunks, hipsters and fools. More poured out of the streets of downtown, a patchwork of red spheres and white and violet, all floating toward Vera. The aliens looked the same, just different colors. Like cousins coming together for a family reunion.

Blue aliens joined the green in their widening circuit around Vera, and now there were twelve orbs whizzing around her. More heading her way.

Callum closed his fingers around the wide glass mouth of the jar. This wasn’t in the manual. “You have to give me all the special rocks, Grandma.” He bent to kiss her on the forehead, and she let go of the heavy jar with a sigh. She was still so strong, carrying this all the way from the Hawthorne district. Or maybe magnetricity had fueled her strength. “Gimme your necklace, too.”

Vera made a sweeping gesture that brought her hand dangerously close to one of the spheres, and he tensed up and felt like puking at the thought of her getting fried. But the circle she made with her arm stopped inches short of the closest alien. “Okay, dear. We’re family. Whatever I have is yours.” She unfastened the hook, and Callum let her drop it into the pickle jar. He held the jar close to his chest. The aliens’ focus changed and their orbit closed around him. They were his aliens now. His shoulder blades tried to touch across his back. This was what he’d wanted, right?

“Stay here, Grandma. Stay here,” he said. He scrambled off the stage with the pickle jar. Magnetricity lined up his red blood cells like a stack of coins. His eyebrows and lashes popped up and his scalp tingled. “Get away,” he said to a wide- eyed woman trying to bow down to him in the mud. He stepped over a passed-out hippie and crammed his hand in the top of the jar to keep any rocks from falling out, the way you’d cram your hand into a French horn bell to bend the pitch.

He stumbled onto the bike path, his boots falling loud against the cement. Few people ventured near the water, afraid, maybe, of falling into the darkness. The river smelled muddy, wild after the day’s rains. The aliens were dazzling and bright, beautiful, just as Grandma Vera had said. But who had asked them to come here and mess up his life? Oh, yeah. Probably Grandma.

Blue and green aliens followed him. This was like that game of hot potato. You did not want to be left holding the pickle jar. Grandma Vera had found the McNugget rocks in the river basin years ago. He didn’t know why the aliens had come back to this river now. He didn’t want to know. He just wanted them to go back into hiding.

Good music worked because it created a melody that dissolved into unbearable tension as patterns were repeated, unexpected dissonances introduced. You threw in harmony that pulled you toward a resolution. The air felt like those tense moments before the music became pleasurable again. He held the jar by the lip and spun around once, twice, three times, like an Olympic hammer thrower. He let go and the jar soared over the Willamette. Green and blue aliens swooped along the parabola of the jar’s path until it dropped into the river. The aliens hovered just above the surface. Water splashed up and crackled like breaking ice as it met the flame-bright edges of the spheres.

“Callum! Callum!” Abby called. She and Juarez battled the mud to move the wheelchair forward. Vera stomped along behind them. When they reached Callum, Lily held out her good hand to hold his.

They watched the spheres form a circle over the water. White, red, gold, joined blue and green. The perimeter expanded as more arrived. Maybe a hundred aliens in all. A psychedelic light show reflected up from the water. He forgot to remember to be afraid.

The circle divided like a class breaking into small groups, with formations of three aliens here, five aliens there. A red with a green and a yellow and a purple, a blue with orange and dirty gold. In the small groups the aliens lost their spherishness. The colors ran and the shapes rushed together. A sound rose, a feverish, buzzing, deafening cosmic amp.

“Dude,” Juarez said. “They’re like, doing it.”

Once he spoke it was obvious Juarez was right. Each mating group thrummed like a drum roll. Light strobed. Sparks flew. Callum felt embarrassed watching something so private.

“Not in front of the children,” Abby said with a laugh.

They came with sonic-boom blasts so loud even Grandma Vera covered her ears. After the thundercrack climax each mating cluster smoorged into one big ovoid about three feet wide. Instead of angsty and colormashed, the alien’s glow was serene and white. Another thundercrack. Another ovoid formed. And on and on. They were witnessing the fucking miracle of life, like seeing a blimp coming out of a chrysalis. One alien blimpoid curveted in mid- river and one drifted to the Hawthorne Bridge to slowly spiral up a support.

One blimpoid floated toward the bank, toward Callum. He was too tired or enchanted to be scared. The alien stopped a yard away, shadowing him. The axes of the thing rhythmically swelled and contracted like it couldn’t decide whether to be wide or tall.

“Can you see me?” he asked.

He strained to hear an answer. This alien was definitely digging him, aware of him in the same way he was conscious of it. Its frequency slowed to match his heart rate. He remembered the snack in his pocket, let go of Lily’s hand and plucked Grandma’s moon rock out of the bag of old peanuts and raisins. He offered it to the alien. Is this what you want? he asked. Or maybe he only thought he said it.

The alien kept doing its alien- oscillation thing. It didn’t want the McNugget any more than Callum did.

“Where did you come from?” he asked.

“That’s pretty obvious,” said Juarez. “Somewhere with rare earths.”

“That could be, like, anywhere in the universe,” Abby said.

Across the river, a white ovoid rose above the crowd like a lost balloon. Thirty yards up, it burst into shards. Light spewed out like cinders seeding the clouds. Callum watched the creature near him to see if it would do something. Friends don’t let friends explode. No response. The cycle of dimming and flashing remained unchanged. Another blimpoid rose to the level of the low-hanging clouds and exploded closer. This time he heard something plunk into the water.

This couldn’t be good. “Uh, maybe we should move,” Callum said. But they stood, transfixed.

“Bon voyage,” said Grandma Vera, as their blimpoid floated up, like the others. Its light flashed brighter, then dimmed.

Poof. Crack.

No more alien.

Alien dust glittered in the clouds. Something hard struck the ground next to Callum’s boot. Another McNugget. He let it cool for a moment and picked it up from the mud.

“Dude. You’re touching alien jism.” Juarez was all right, but there were things he didn’t understand. He didn’t know how lucky he was his dad was still alive.

“Respect, man,” Callum said. The rocks weren’t jism. They weren’t even rocks. “They came back to bury their corpses,” he said. “Along the river.”

“Like salmon spawning,” Lily said. Her voice broke. She opened her hand and Callum set a rock corpse in her palm and they were all quiet for a moment. He was thinking about the funeral, about the finality of first rocks hitting the casket. The funeral was sad because it marked an end to one time, but the end made a new beginning possible. How Lao Tzu.

“I don’t get it. Why didn’t we know about them?” Abby said.

“I think they were buried, and people dug them up, and thought they were something normal like thunder eggs.”

“I dunno, I’m starting to wonder about thunder eggs.” She had the cutest smirk.

“So they ate rare earths and then it took thousands of years to digest their dinner?” Juarez said. “Gross.”

“Something like that,” Callum said. “They woke up when it was time to reproduce.”

“I’d wake up if it was time to reproduce,” Juarez said.

Most of the aliens had gone up now, the next generation carried away on the winds to gather strength and await their time.

Lily handed her rock corpse back to Callum. “Let them rest with the others,” she said, but she was asking him, not telling him what to do.

Callum carried both rock corpses to the bank and skipped them past the shallows and into deep water. He stared across the river, toward East Portland and a soft glow at the base of the clouds.

“Well, I’ll have something to tell my grandchildren someday,” Grandma Vera said.

Lily looked ready to argue. “One of your grandchildren already knows,” she said. “Sometimes he knows more than the rest of us.” She rested her hand on her belly. “But you should definitely tell this little one about it. He’ll want to know.”

“He?” said Callum.

“He,” said Lily, and Callum opened his notebook to start writing down names.

 

(Special thanks to Loren Bruns.)