Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Leap
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Sara is in the parking lot, looking out over the beach. I’m in a chubby three-year-old with popsicle residue on her bathing suit. I toddle over to a deep hole in the sand recently abandoned by a teenager, which is now filling with water as the tide comes in. I lay the first egg. The only visible sign from my three-year-old body is a slight bulging of the eyes, but astrally my ovipositor reaches down and releases one shining, silver globe into the cradling mud.
We can’t lay eggs on the Astral plane. We have to come to the material plane for that, and on the material plane we’re free to inhabit bodies.
I look up to see Sara staring directly at me from the top of the beach, her eyes glinting, the wind lifting her black ringlets in a wave around her shoulders as she levels a spirit harpoon at me. The harpoon, if it hit, would kill the toddler, but Sara knows what my eggs mean. They mean more Astral Takers. They mean that maybe my kind will swarm the world again soon.
I send the toddler careening down the beach toward a rearing, six-foot wave. A woman screams. The harpoon embeds in the sand behind me with a muffled thud. I leap into a 50-something, sunburned man with a belly like a bowling ball. As him, I tell my wife I’m getting the other towel from the car, take the keys, and soon I’m roaring over the blacktop, headed back into the city. I feel my Astral Thread resonating with Sara’s channeled fury. It will take her days to find me again.
A lean young man in a silver convertible passes me illegally. I leap into him, leaving the potbellied husband to swerve off the road in the confusion of regaining his body.
The sun shines on my shoulders and the wind caresses my scalp. It’s a beautiful day. Maybe I’ll lay the next one in the park.
Hunting for Ernest Hemingway in Kudu Heaven
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
I had been up more than an hour, drinking coffee, when Thorn came out of his tent to join me.
“Coffee?” I said, pointing a hoof.
“Wonderful,” said Thorn, and took a cup. Thorn was a springbok, hardly half my size, but he was a good friend, and a damned good hunter.
“Ready for it?” said Thorn. “Maybe you’ll have better luck today.”
“Maybe.”
We set out from camp toward the water hole we’d watched for three days. We hadn’t seen anything but a few dog teasers, but I didn’t care. Crouching in the grass, the dust cool against my legs, the sky the same blank blue as a robin’s egg, I was happy. It was good to be a kudu, hunting, in Kudu Heaven.
There was nothing that morning. It was dry and still, and very hot. The trees came close to the edge of the water hole, shading it, and it was hard to see from where we sat downwind. We didn’t see anything until a few minutes before sunset. It was nearly too dark to shoot already.
“There!” Thorn whispered. “By god, there!”
An Ernest Hemingway had come out of the high grasses, an old bull, heavy, powerful, wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts.
“Look at that bastard,” Thorn said. “Isn’t he magnificent?”
I lined Hemingway up with my Winchester special, with its hoof-sized trigger. He crouched by the water, alert, confident. Heat rippled the air between us. Then he lifted his head, and he reared. He’d seen my horns. He bolted for the trees.
I shut away my excitement and tracked ahead of him with the Winchester. When I had the shot, I squeezed. Hemingway jumped at the edge of the trees and disappeared into them.
“Good shot! Marvelous!” said Thorn, leaping out over the grass on all fours. I followed him at a trot. “Do you think you killed him?”
“I don’t know if I hit him.”
“I’m sure you hit him.”
“I don’t think so.”
He was there when we reached the edge of the wood, collapsed in the brush. My shot had gone through his lung and heart. His massive head was turned to the side, staring at an anthill with glassy eyes. Thorn was delighted. Hemingway looked fierce even dead.
He was mine, dead like that. But he’d been mine since I lined him up in my sights. If I’d let him live, he would have been mine and alive, still roaming. Maybe that’s what hunters were bad at: letting things live.
“God, what a kill!” said Thorn. “Don’t you admire these things?”
“No,” I said.
“You don’t?”
“No. Not anymore.”