Page 11 of Fable for the End of the World

“Shadowing my dad,” he says. “He finally decided he was sick of me turning green at the sight of blood, so we’re doing a bit of exposure therapy. Someone is bound to come in needing stitches.”

Hardly a day goes by in Esopus Creek without someone slipping down their steps and gashing their head, wobbling on their raft and falling face-first against the wood, or, when the water is treacherously low, crumpling their raft against one of the sharp rocks that jut upward like shark fins. When Luka was twelve, he crashed into a rock, stripping all the skin from his left forearm and chipping one of his front teeth. I’ve heard girls whispering about how cute his slightly imperfect smile is.

“I was probably just as squeamish when I first started,” I say, which is an understatement. I used to keep a bucket under thecounter so I could periodically lean over and retch. “And I only deal with dead things.”

Jacob laughs. “Will it sound creepy if I say sometimes I hope you get hurt—just a little—so I can see you?”

Thatiscreepy, but also kind of sweet, in a weird way. My cheeks are warm. “Best of luck overcoming your phobia of blood. We’re going to need another doctor someday. Already we could do with more than just one.”

Jacob’s smile falters. “Well... he’s training me so I can apply for medical school. In the City. Get an actual Caerus license, get out of here.”

The flush leaves my cheeks, and my veins grow cold. People my age are always talking about leaving Esopus. They wistfully recount their plans to move to the City, or at least to take off to a different town, one on higher ground. Esopus Creek sits in a valley right between the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains, so all the rainwater that gathers on top of those peaks slides down and puddles into our town.

But I’ve never thought about leaving and, as far as I know, neither has Luka. Where would we go? What would we do? The City feels too distant to even imagine. I’ve never even seen one of those sleek high-speed trains that connects the outlying Counties to the metropolitan region downstate. Our dad was born in Esopus, and so was his father, and his father. We’re four generations deep in this water.

Not that this legacy seemed to have any sentimental effect on Dad. He made leaving look so easy. But Luka and I couldn’tabandon Mom. She’d die without us.

I’m about to reply to Jacob when there’s a sudden, powerful gust of wind and a warbling, uneven call that sounds like wood groaning under my feet. Everyone on Main Street looks up, gripped by identical terror.

A winged shadow passes over us, blotting out the shy light of sunrise. We all recognize the creature right away, with its enormous scaly wings and cruelly curved beak, its jagged proportions. It dips and reels overhead, awkward with the novel bloat of its body.

Once upon a time it was a gull, obnoxiously loud and bolder than it had any right to be, but now it’s something else, something treacherous and terrifying. A mutation, transfigured by the polluted air and radiation but most of all by evolutionary necessity.

Everyone ducks and scrambles for cover, and fear rolls over me. I’ve seen gull mutations carry off cats and dogs, and there are rumors that one of them even snatched up a small child.

Larger wings make it easier to stay in flight for longer periods of time. Given the near endless stretches of flooded land in New Amsterdam, you could go for miles without so much as an outcropping for a bird to rest. Water glints off its scales, turning them iridescent as it circles and circles, looking for prey. Scales are better than feathers for sloughing off thick, fetid water. It’s survival of the fittest taken to its most extreme and appalling end.

There’s the crack of a gunshot, and the gull mutation plummets out of the sky. Its body falls into the flooded street, where it floats with its wings outstretched, easily the size of my raft. Blood, almost the same color as the muddy water, trickles from its breast.

Jacob glances at me questioningly, but I’m a taxidermist, not a trash collector. Like everyone else, I’m going to leave the ugly gull mutation where it is, until another rainstorm comes and flushes it away or its body decomposes and joins the water itself.

“Shit,” Jacob said. “I haven’t seen one get this close in a while. Disgusting.”

It’s hard to defend the mutations, especially the ones fabled to carry off small children, but they’re also the only reason I have a job. The faunae of New Amsterdam have been mutating for generations. We have squirrels and deer with scaled bellies, rabbits with webbed paws and canine teeth, and birds grown to monstrous proportions. Changed by the hostile world around us, driven by the bone-deep need all organisms share: to survive.

Everyone thinks they’re hideous, a grotesque reminder of the planet’s inexorable decay. That’s why the work Luka and I do, killing and preserving the last of the unchanged deer, rabbits, squirrels, and birds, is valuable. If it weren’t for us, they’d disappear completely. Stuffed and dead, they’ll exist forever. Mounted in the studies and dining rooms of City folk, they’re immortal.

But seeing a mutation turns my stomach all the same. It’s a reminder that our work has a planned obsolescence, an expiration date. One day we’ll wake up and all the ordinary animals will be gone. Only the mutations will be left, and the lab-grown meat that Caerus drones carry to our doorsteps.

Our livelihood will die with them. To Luka, I know it’s just a paycheck, a shallow cushion between us and a steep pit of debt. Maybe I’m the only one who assigns a deeper meaning to it. EvenJacob talked about leaving like it’s the simplest thing in the world. I can’t help feeling like I’m holding on to something that is slipping further and further out of my grasp with every passing day. I say goodbye to Jacob and step back onto my raft, poling toward the shop.

The stubborn leak in the ceiling has filled the bucket beneath to its brim, but the shop is dry—a relief. I empty it and then unload Luka’s latest haul. Two rabbits, already stiff, and the deer, which is so heavy in death that I’m panting by the time I’ve dragged it onto my worktable. Since we have a down payment on the deer, I start with him first. He’s young—still a few fading white spots on his flank—but his antlers have come in nicely, a broad and curling coronet of bone.

With my buck knife, I cut a seam down his belly, careful to puncture just the skin and not any of the muscles or organs underneath. It took me a long time to be able to make such precise cuts—it pains me to think how many potential mounts I ruined back then, all those credits down the drain. At least we could eat those deer. We had venison stew and venison jerky for weeks afterward.

I like to think of it as taking off the animal’s shirt and pants. That makes it easier to stomach. Like the heart of the animal isn’t its skin, or its meat, or even its actual heart. There’s something enduring but invisible that constitutes the very core of the creature. I’d call it asoul, but even I wouldn’t take myself seriously if I spoke the word aloud. And Luka would laugh at me.

Unlike with Luka’s hunting, there was no one to teach metaxidermy. I figured it out by myself, over the course of several bloody, woozy months. My early mounts were overstuffed and lopsided, and they looked half like mutations themselves. People bought them anyway; people from the outlying Counties, at least. We didn’t start getting our City customers until my work started getting decent, only a year and a half ago. It was convenient timing, because that’s when Dad disappeared for good.

I slip the young buck out of his skin, taking care not to rip the hide. He’s so freshly dead that there are still some oils in his coat, and it’s soft under my hands as I lay it out on the drying table.

Dad approved of the business. He approved of doing anything outside Caerus’s control.A system of exploitation, he called it. The more dependent we are on Caerus, the more power we give them. Dad’s whole life was about outsmarting, evading. When he was around, we never went without power because he figured out sly—and very illegal—ways to wire us to the grid. As far as I know, he never had a single credit on his account. When he needed something, he bartered for it, offering his skills as a self-taught electrician, handyman, or hunter. He patched roofs and fixed plumbing. He rebuilt Mrs. Prinslew’s crumbling porch, with Luka hanging around to hand him wrenches or hammers. I could tell from Luka’s furrowed brow that he was trying to commit everything Dad did to memory, so that one day he could do it, too. I know he imagined they’d be a team, father and son evading thatsystem of exploitationtogether.

My chest tightens suddenly, surprising me. I thought I’d gotten numb to memories of Dad, but now they wash over me likefloodwater. I can feel his strong arms around my shoulders, and see his warm brown eyes crinkling when he smiled. The knife wobbles in my hand and I have to put it down and draw in a breath so I don’t make the wrong cut.

Dad was born in Esopus Creek, but he spoke differently and thought differently than everyone else. His mother was a schoolteacher. She had a lot of pre-Caerus books around, histories that were otherwise obliterated. People and places we were never supposed to know, or at least were supposed to forget. I wish I had paid more attention to the things he told us, but that’s the way it always is: You never really understand what’s important until you lose it.

Dad was the one who told me about evolution and natural selection. Only the strongest creatures survive, so their traits are passed down to their descendants. Gulls with larger wingspans were more likely to survive, so with each successive generation, their wings grew larger and larger. The new replaces the old. The powerful replace the powerless.

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