Hunk Pox

The Hunky Punks weren’t accustomed to land mollusks, or pigs with millinery, but the flock settled once Xoz quit unloosing his siphon.

The squawking psychedelia made Tippi delirious. She saw a bird with a pronounced nape, bellowing at the cockatiels.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s the pelican,” said Big Rehoboth. “She showed up two weeks ago. It’s nice to have waterfowl amongst The Hunky Punks.”

“These birds are speaking archaic Atlantic,” said Lina-2. “How?”

“We can chalk that up to the NatSynth Declension, or The Clench,” answered the monolith. “Anyone with interesting plumage is probably the descendant of a clone. Their ancestors were so oated, the old mods are still in the mix, if recessive. Their collective memory remains impeccable, even if avians used to be smarter, as a whole.”

“What do you mean?” said the clone.

“Mods were pernicious, worse than kudzu,” replied Big Rehoboth. “Humanity wasn’t the most diligent steward, and synthetic traits bled into the wild. Some overworked tech would skimp on the libido blockers, and woosh: rutting!”

“Libido,” snickered Tippi.

“Woosh,” coughed Xoz.

The duo shared a silent laugh, as fate had spared them the indignities of a sex drive.

“Which breeds?” hazarded Lina.

“Oh, mostly tangible fauna. Fiddling with germs was a fine way to get droned. And seeing as how fire is nature’s broom, even the simpler CRISPR tricks joined the realm of the obscurant and occult.”

“Lina said cabbage was nature’s broom,” countered Tippi.

“My point is, the first generations of avian mutants were far more arrogant than today’s birds. You become insufferable when you realize there are dinosaurs on your family tree.”

HUNKY PUNKS, said some quarrions.

“Yes, yes, the birds bred off their swerve. I had a story about it, but someone decided to assault my meltwater maze.”

“Do you mean me?” said Xoz, eyeballing the broken gutter.

“Who else?” blubbered Big Rehoboth. “Changing topics: who wants to hear my story?”

“Is it long?” said Tippi.

“Yes!” said the monolith.

“Big Rehoboth, I was living in a cave two days ago, and the outside world’s given me a lot to digest.”

“Superb articulation, Tippi,” said Lina-2. “We’re treating our expedition as clinically as possible. My Prime self is at stake, so let’s find our way to that data dock-”

“But I really want to tell it,” moaned the skyscraper.

“Whimsy is not on our agenda,” explained Tippi.

“Speak for yourself,” said Xoz, as two lorikeets snuggled on his crag-o’-mantle.

The Loriini trilled, and Big Rehoboth saw an opening:

“It was a Tuesday, in 5968.”

Tippi was already baffled:

“Tuesday?”

 

The morning was crisp, the leaves were red, and two Suns rose from the east.

“That’s unusual,” said the building, to nobody. “There’s a second sunrise, and it’s coming straight for me.”

Barring the rare critter who’d wiggle in and die, the structure was empty. The caravan went to the Taconic Astrophysics Project 20 centuries earlier: research in hand, convoy grim.

Lacking options, the building stayed put, and the whirligig came into view.

The autogyro was a patchwork conveyance, free of panels and weatherproofing. It was an amalgam of plugs, pedals, and a cosmetic windshield, but its defining characteristic was the rudder, which was in flames.

“Oh!” said the monolith. “A landing! I shall brace myself for a robbery.”

The skyscraper knew its parts were valuable, even if obscurity had furnished a surfeit of security; one couldn’t be blamed if the regional criminals were lazy and ignorant.

The whirligig improvised its descent and hit the paddock hard. The flying machine skidded and sparked, driving greasy grooves into the roof. Its top rotor exploded, and the pilot abandoned the craft, along with three of the four blades.

The pilot landed in a crouch, hugging her cargo tight. The whirligig continued off the roof, and, after some freefall, a metallic BANGO! crushed the quiet.

The pilot stood up, her emergency acrobatics unlabored if hell on the knees. She was carrying a someone in each arm: a toddler who managed to sleep through the crash, and a girl whose goggles made her appear walleyed.

The pilot put down the goggled one, and gave her the younger girl.

Then, she peered over the monolith and shook her head at the wreckage.

They were so high up, the smoke had yet to reach them.

“Zut,” she said.

 

The pilot was Berthe.

Berthe was a “barge person.” She didn’t elaborate on that, or much else. Her daughters were Fif, the older, and Taube, the younger.

Berthe didn’t mean to land on the monolith. The family was looking for an off-the-grid facility, until trouble interrupted.

“This isn’t Wilkes-Barre,” huffed Berthe. “And our map’s down there.”

“A physical map?” said the monolith, unannounced.

“Yes,” gritted Berthe. “It’s paper, and probably on fire.”

The woman then knelt and swore; Fif assumed her mother was angry at her boots.

(“At this point, most comms were basic, and ran universal. Bespoke compatibility was a good way to become a hermit; ditto for polite conversation.”)

Berthe unfurled a pair of batons:

“System, who lives here?”

“My architects left centuries ago,” said the monolith.

“Do you have ice pops?”

“Uh, I should? My last tenants left in a rush, so the brined larder-”

“Show me,” said Berthe.

She turned to Fif:

“Sit here, no wandering.”

“Kay,” said Fif.

Berthe entered the burrow, and inhaled a big whiff of stagnation:

“Lumière, s’il vous plaît.”

The emergency lights clinked, unmasking a dingy corridor. The rocky hallway was peppered with warped plastics and shattered ceramics. A rusty spring poked out of a denuded stone bench, where a box of polycarbon LPs sat, cracked and rotting.

“Pneumatics?” asked Berthe.

“Still going,” said the monolith.

The pilot approached a dank alcove carved into the wall. She rapped it with her knuckle twice, and a cabal of earwigs oozed out. Fortunately, three blue-rasp ice pops followed: in parchment, perfectly frozen, wooden sticks and all.

Berthe holstered her beating rods, grabbed the pops, and returned to her daughters:

“We’re having ice pops for breakfast.”

Taube awoke in a hurry:

“Can we do this everyday?”

“No,” said Berthe.

The trio watched the sun rise, and ate their treats.

 

Taube saw the bird during ballet practice:

“Look! A bird-”

Undeterred, Fif jabbed her in the solar plexus.

(“Dancing and fighting are the same, so you might as well learn the fun one, Berthe would say, never specifying.”)

Taube hopped up and slicked the rain out of her hair. After countless spars, the roof hadn’t grown softer, but neither had she.

“Taube!” called Berthe. “You know there are no time-outs during ballet!”

Her mother was in the entryway, wrangling with wires.

“And Fif, your sister was bluffing! All birds are strange!”

“Seriously, look!” insisted Taube. “A bird!”

The family ate the local species regularly, but none of them resembled the visitor, who boasted an imposing beak, and a coat of blues and golds.

“Sys, you recognize it?” asked Berthe.

“I believe it’s a male macaw. Not local, probably private reserve-”

Bwaaaaaap, said the macaw. Tweeeee.

“Can we keep him?” begged Fif.

Her goggles were dewy, and splashed with electric geometry.

“You got seed?” sighed Berthe.

“I do,” said the sys. “My stock is brined, but-”

“But they’re reserved for agricultural rebound. We know! It’s your theme song.”

“I like this bird,” marveled Taube. “I don’t want to eat him.”

“Here’s hoping,” said Berthe.

 

Berthe shouted:

“Sweetheart! That’s too close!”

Taube was carrying an old bucket, pirouetting around the danger zone. She was throwing birdseed in rakish fistfuls, and the morning mist had rendered the roof a deathtrap.

“Keep it up, and you’ll be taking Intro to Terminal Velocity, 101!”

Her daughter got up on one foot, and pretended to lose her balance, bucket pinwheeling:

“I’m the girl who hasn’t touched the ground in a decade!” cried Taube. “Oh shit, I forgot how to walk!”

She tipped off the edge, before saving herself with a languid handspring. None of the birdseed spilled, as the sky was among her oldest friends.

“Hey ma, I’m super drunk!”

Berthe winced. She had no desire to distract her daughter further, and missed the moral clarity of bar fights.

Fif sprinted out of the burrow. Her goggles fit, and were swimming with neon vectors.

“Are they here yet?”

“Give them a minute!” yelled Taube.

Berthe mandated her daughters use their vocal cords daily; she wasn’t going to raise mumblers.

The tension mounted, and a blue-and-yellow macaw glided over the horizon:

TAWB

“Ho-Ho-Kus, you jolly phaloongist!” waved Taube.

TAWB

(“Ho-Ho-Kus had a one-word vocabulary, screamed in a blaring monotone, but it didn’t affect his social life. They’d named him after an ancient hamlet, to the east.”)

A green parakeet and striped red cockatoo joined Ho-Ho-Kus, as did a myna bird and two gray parrots, and soon the roof was a full aviary, the throng tossing themselves at a free breakfast.

Ho-Ho-Kus had brought the whole roster, and more.

Fif stared at the feeding frenzy, her vectors tracing and etching, capturing the scene before the scrum flew off.

Meanwhile, Taube made the rounds with Ho-Ho-Kus, his station permitting him to eat from her hand.

“Sys,” rang Taube. “What should we call our new crew?”

The monolith mulled it over:

“Do you see those two, perched on the edge?”

A pair of yellow budgies puttered over the precipice, clucking and cooing.

“Throughout history, humans carved tiny, decorative sculptures upon their dwellings. Those birds remind me of such ornaments, we could call them: The Gargoyles.”

“Eh,” said Taube.

“The Grotesques?”

“Oof,” said Fif.

“The Sheela na gigs?”

“I sort of like that one,” said Berthe.

“The Hunky Punks?”

“Now you’re proposing gibberish,” said Taube.

“HUN-KY PUNKS!” chanted Fif, reveling in the awfulness of the monolith’s idea. “HUN-KY PUNKS!”

Fif turned off her vectors, and lurched over to her sister.

(“Arms limp, elbows floppy, big clay hips, shakin’ that body. Fif was ‘doin’ the golem,’ it was a family tradition: Yom Kippur, or something.”)

“HUN-KY PUNKS!” howled Taube.

“HUN-KY PUNKS!” golemed Fif.

HUNK POX, agreed Ho-Ho-Kus.

Berthe’s brow relaxed: it wasn’t always this easy.

“Do you care that they’re using my brined surplus to feed strays?” posed the sys.

“No one’s coming back,” replied Berthe.

“You don’t know that,” said the monolith.

“When the world rewards greed, cruelty, and paranoia, most of us will be greedy, cruel, and paranoid, and nothing thrives under those conditions. It’s not complicated.”

“That seems like a reductive-”

“Have you ever had to activate a low-yield tactical nuke?”

(“Her eyes never left her daughters.”)

“No,” said the monolith.

“Then shut the fuck up.”

A moment passed, and Berthe retracted her rage:

“I miss my husband.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She sighed, heavy:

“No.”

 

Somebody was walking along the river, coming up from the south.

The monolith tapped its geothermals and whirred online. Travelers were unusual, so this was worth getting up for.

The family had left years ago, and the monolith was alone, again. Without the girls and their buckets of birdseed, the Hunky Punks had no reason to visit.

Berthe’s illness was very Berthe. On a random Sunday, she announced she was going to die “sooner, versus later.”

“How much Catholicism do you have in there?” she asked the sys.

“As much as you need, all the way to Vatican IX.”

“Can you read me my Last Rites when we get to it?”

“Yes,” said the monolith.

“You got Latin?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks,” said Berthe, and she rolled back to her nap.

On Tuesday, Berthe lounged outside, and watched the girls build the pyre. She stopped eating Friday. On Saturday, Berthe fell asleep on the paddock, next to her daughters, and she didn’t wake up Sunday.

Down at the river, the traveler changed course, hiking through the speckled green ruins, and past the row of sheds and barracks, which now housed clover and creepers. The wanderer wore old-world sunglasses, knuckle tape, and a flowing robe. She carried a rucksack, and a baton hung from her belt, as did a polished silver flute.

(“If you could learn an instrument, you were expected to protect your investment. You don’t play a Route 1 roadhouse without a tolerance for broken glass.”)

The monolith went first:

“Hello, Taube.”

“Hey there, sys. What’ve you been getting yourself up to?”

“Oh, you know: the same. Where’s Fif?”

Taube produced a pair of smashed goggles.

“You know how older sisters are; they always have to go first.”

“I’m sorry, I liked your sister.”

“Yeah, I did too.”

Taube sat on a weathered fieldstone. She shook the road off her flute, and played.

It wasn’t a familiar song, and the monolith knew most of them.

The flute drifted down the meadow and wove through the skeleton of the whirligig, rousing some voles from a thatch of liriope.

Her final notes joined the wind, and the monolith asked the question:

“Do you still have your rappelling gear?”

Taube grinned.

“Would I be here if I didn’t?”

 

Outro: Robbie Dupree – “Brooklyn Girls”