Non-Native Species

Fiction by ​Emily Weber

​At the sudden bang of the back door, a flock of starlings burst from where they had been perched in the bare branches of an oak tree. Ramona muttered something in Romanian that sounded like Ma freshy la ee-cray. Ylenia didn’t ask her what it meant.

They had given up on keeping the starlings away; there was nothing to do but wait. The birds disappeared from sight but never left. They rasped from high in the branches and deep within bushes and from the tops of unmaintained telephone poles, their bodies iridescent in the blistering winter sunlight. Starlings had always been around—they were not a new species or particularly noteworthy among the region’s more colorful cardinals, blue jays and goldfinches—but they had become unmanageable in Ramona’s view. They ate the cherries that were just too green for the humans, drove more peaceable birds away, shit all over the house and the greenhouse.

“Tell me his name again,” Ramona said, heading to the work bench at the front of the greenhouse.

“Whose name?”

“The bastard who brought starlings to North America.”

“Oh, Eugene something,” Ylenia said. The memory of the last name Schieffelin was long gone, so many grains of sand sucked into the dark sea of her memory.

“Central Park, right? Where he released them?”

“Yeah, sixty starlings one year and then another fifty the next year. He wanted to bring every bird mentioned by Shakespeare to North America.”

Ramona grunted. “I don’t know who to blame for my bare cherry trees: Shakespeare or Eugene something.”

“I blame the birds.”

Ramona had only a casual bird-watcher’s book among her dwindling collection, stored on a flimsy wire shelf in the basement; most of her library was now devoted to horticulture. She had bartered away or, in the early days, burned for fuel her textbooks on freshwater algae, microbial genetics, and wetland ecology. There was nothing in her bird-watching book on getting starlings to leave your backyard.

They worked on that week’s orders without speaking. Compared with most people in town, their work environment was noisy: the lights—the coveted lights—had a particular tone. The hiss of the sprayer system and the drip, drip, drip of water on petals and leaves. The birds that found their way in nested in the rafters, fluttered disapprovingly above the two humans. Sometimes Ylenia thought she could hear things growing, which sounded like a calm hush. Or maybe it was the thick quiet that blanketed everything. She could close her eyes and recall with saddening accuracy what the world used to sound like: whooshing cars outside her bedroom window, bass-heavy music pounding from their speakers; the wailing sirens of police cars and ambulances and fire trucks; planes and helicopters in the sky, so ordinary that nobody below would bother to look up at something that would have stunned humans a century ago. And then there was the noise afforded by electricity, the silent giver: ringing phones and the laugh-tracks on network TV sitcoms and refrigerators perpetually chilling soda that you could have cold whenever you wanted. The unearned, unnoticed rewards of being born in an industrialized country sometime between 1945 and three years ago.

The job was easier in the spring and summer when they could plant in the outside flower beds and use the greenhouse for temperamental flowers, but in the winter months they had only the greenhouse beds. In her corner of the greenhouse, Ramona whistled to herself and cut flowers for that week’s orders. She stood at a work bench with a cabinet underneath, full of the other things that would go into her arrangements: twisted tin foil (they would work on it together over dinner some nights), old wires pulled from now-useless electronics, used ribbon, strands of Christmas lights missing their plugs. It was their private human joke: they were “cutting” the arrangements with garbage, anything shiny or full of wires. Their version of baking soda in cocaine.

“I like this one,” Ylenia said, picking up a completed arrangement: three sunflowers, a twisted green shoot of bamboo and a giant green and blue lollipop she had found at the beach on a scavenging hunt, completely intact and unlicked. “It reminds me of summer.”

“You like the colors? The lollipop? The way it speaks to—” Ramona paused, summoning. “’The way it evokes youthful exuberance and the steady passage of time?’”

“You made that up.”

“All art is made up.”

“Still, you definitely missed out on a career as an art critic.”

Ramona picked a fuzz off the lollipop. “And to think I wasted all that time studying marine biology.”

“Any feedback from last week’s delivery?”

“Marco didn’t pass anything along when he dropped off this week’s order.”

“How many this week?”

“Nine.”

“They wanted eight last week.”

“Maybe we’re being tested. Maybe They don’t understand how Earth’s growing seasons work. Maybe They’re developing an undying affection for ugly-ass flower arrangements.”

Ylenia shivered and burrowed her neck a little deeper in her coat. Most mornings, they were in the greenhouse just as the sun was rising. Early March. Real florists—professionals who had once done it for money, for humans—would have been two weeks past the Valentine’s Day rush, with no holidays until Mother’s Day or Easter or junior proms. They would make do by decorating the little dramas of human life: babies and baptisms, weddings, graduations, rupturing relationships in need of a bribe, sick patients in cheerless hospital rooms, bare lids on full caskets.

Moving as slowly as she dared, Ylenia transferred amaranth seedlings from the cupboard where they had been locked in darkness to a space she had cleared yesterday under the lights. In eight to ten weeks, they would be ready for Ramona to cut and dry for arrangements. The ageratum wasn’t germinating as quickly as she would have liked. She would have to wait. The black-eyed Susans, one of a few holdovers from the previous year, had grown a powdery mildew on their lower leaves; should she pull them entirely or try to concoct something to kill the fungi but not the flowers?

She checked the vegetables. The eggplants and broccoli and leeks had sprouted. Nothing from the onions. Nothing from the cabbage. She would have to wait.



Ramona was hanging washed clothes outside the greenhouse to dry, and Ylenia was tightening the loose hinge on the shed door when Marco appeared with his dog, a tired-looking German Shepherd crossed with something that downsized it. The dog had two small bags strapped across its back, and Marco wore a backpack and carried two crates.

Pack dogs, Ylenia thought.

Marco dropped the crates near the shed. “Your Highnesses.”

“What have we here?” Ramona tried to say around the clothespin lodged in her mouth.

“Batteries, as requested” Marco said, pulling the bags from the dog’s back.

“Too many AA,” Ramona said, frowning as she rifled. “We need more Ds.”

Ylenia slipped a handful of AA batteries into her jacket and started picking through the two crates. Magazines: the newest ones three years old, printed just months or even weeks before They came. Redbook, Good Housekeeping, a stack of yellowing National Geographics that smelled like a musty basement. Not a rare find. At the bottom, a handful of thick magazines that could have also been very thin books, full of poetry and fiction in tiny print and no graphics. Next to useless. In the second crate: one bottle of Tylenol, seal broken but still containing pills; one unopened box of Band-Aids, the woven kind that actually sticks to skin; a packet of antiseptic wipes. And food: ground oats; half a tin of instant coffee, a luxury; two boxes of Celestial Seasonings chamomile tea, to tide them over until they could brew lettuce tea; a single sleeve of Oreo’s, at least three years old; Morton’s salt, unopened; two jars of pickled sweet peppers and three jars of tomato sauce, all with homemade labels. Somebody in town must have canned produce last summer. Ylenia ran her fingers tenderly over the Oreo’s and grinned at Ramona, who was busy fetching the clipboard from its nail on the shed door.

“Ready,” Ramona said to Marco, pencil poised.

“One hour for Mrs. Daley. She’ll be here tonight. Two hours for Mr. Jensen tomorrow. Two hours for Mrs. Muradov on Thursday. One hour for Mr. Duarte, Friday. Two hours for the new chick, hang on…” Ramona’s pencil hovered in the air. Marco flipped through his notebook until he reached the back pages, slid a finger down the columns until he reached the new name: “Lola Batejan.”

“New chick?”

“Came last week on horseback, if you can believe that. With a newborn, if you can believe that, too. The baby’s not even two months old. She needs electricity for her—”

Ramona waved a hand, cutting him off. “You know the deal: we don’t care why they need our electricity, and they don’t try to steal it from us.”

Ylenia ran a hand down the dog’s back and scratched its ears. It regarded her tentatively, looking back and forth between Marco and the starlings scuttling around the yard. The dog wore no collar; it just followed Marco around because he fed it. Ylenia had had a dog growing up, Zoro, a black lab mutt that had to be put down three or four years ago. Stomach cancer. Ylenia was eight or nine when her father brought him home from the pound. Off his leash, he had raced around the backyard like a horse: the whites of his eyes shone, his back legs crossed in front of his front legs, his sharp claws tore up the dirt. Ylenia and her father had laughed; her mother had declared the dog a “wild child” and stormed into the house to unload supplies from the pet store. Three years ago, when the wildness had left and his fur had gone white in places, Ylenia and her father had taken him to the vet. While the vet inserted the needle, her father had held his head and Ylenia stroked his ears, reassuring him that he was a good boy.

Marco kicked at the ground and made a horse noise with his lips. “Any requests?”

“No veggies to share yet,” Ylenia said. “We need seeds, if anybody can find a pack somewhere. More gardening gloves. More stuff for the arrangements. Tin foil. Pinwheels. Stuff with wires. Centerpiece decorations, anything. We’re low on flowers.”

“And if somebody can tell me how to get rid of starlings…” Ramona added.

“Got it: the usual.” Marco stuffed his notebook and pencil—the stubby kind they used to use on golf courses—inside the breast pocket of his jacket, gave a low whistle to the dog, and turned.

“I’ll be back Friday. Don’t forget, They wanted nine arrangements this week.”



Ylenia sat at the kitchen table, shuffling and shuffling and shuffling a bent deck of cards. She wouldn’t convince Ramona to play Go Fish or War or Rat Screw—their father’s favorite game—but she liked the feeling of the cards whooshing through her fingers, the pleasing crunch they made at the end of a bridge. They were alone, as they always were; the last patron of the back shed had left an hour ago and the sun had been down for hours.

“Did you ever ride the Ferris wheel at Marvel Park?” Ylenia asked.

Ramona was draped over the sofa, her long legs dangling over the armrest, her forearm covering her eyes. Ylenia thought of a miner sprawled out after a day under the earth. All she needed was a half-empty bottle of whiskey dangling from one hand and a five o’clock shadow.

“I think I was there once,” Ramona mumbled. “When I was like seven or eight.”

“Oh.”

“What made you think of it?”

“I’m always remembering stuff that had lights for no reason.”

“Ferris wheels have lights for a reason,” Ramona said, sitting up. “Would you ride an unlit Ferris wheel in the dark?”

“I meant the lights on the outside of the wheel,” Ylenia said. “The kind you can only see if you’re looking at the skyline from far away. The Ferris wheel at Marvel Park used to do these pulsing patterns and zig-zags and swirls and hearts, but you could only see it if you weren’t in the park.”

“Hmm.”

Ylenia shuffled the deck again. “Did Dad take you? The one time you went.”

“No. He was with your mom by then.”
​
Ylenia fanned the cards across the table and tried to flip them all over in one move, like she’d once seen a dealer do on TV. It didn’t work. When she wanted to talk about their father, she had to keep her hands moving and keep Ramona from looking directly at her. They lived together and worked together just fine—these days, you had to make do however you could—but two years into their forced co-habitation, Ylenia still couldn’t get Ramona to talk about their father. She wanted to hear what he was like before he left Ramona’s mother and married hers. She wanted to hear about the time Ramona, her mother, and their father went to Niagara Falls without Ylenia and her mother. She wanted to hear Ramona use one of their father’s weird sayings: “A long blink” for a nap. “Gotchies” for underwear. “Jiggity-jig” when walking through the front door after a long journey.

All three of their parents had been killed in the first two months of the occupation. Ramona’s mother had died scrambling to find insulin, and Ylenia’s mother and their father had died from an outbreak of the flu, before the hospitals had re-opened. They didn’t even know where they were buried--if they had been buried.

“Poisonous berries,” Ramona mumbled, like she was coming out of a deep sleep. “For the birds.”

“What?”

“We grow poisonous berries of some kind, and the starlings eat them and die.”

“What about the other birds? And what if the berries aren’t poisonous to starlings? And where would we get berry bushes?”

“We ask around. We ask Them. They have access to seed banks.”

“What if we poison the other birds?”

“What other birds? It’s nothing but starlings!” Ramona launched from the sofa and went to the crate of books and magazines.

Ylenia slipped the cards back in their worn cardboard sleeve. “I don’t like them either, but there has to be a better way.”

“Well I can’t exactly Google this, can I?” She started flipping through magazines angrily, pulling the pages taut as she scanned them. Ylenia joined her on the sofa. “Here.” Ramona handed her one of the thicker magazines.

“This is poetry.”

“I know. Read me something. I’m all jittery.”

“Because of the birds?”

“Tomorrow Marco is bringing them nine of our worst arrangements ever, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Ylenia flipped to a short poem and read aloud: “I sing the will to love: the will that carves the will to live, the will that saps the will to hurt, the will that kills the will to die; the will that made and keeps you warm, the will that points your eyes ahead, the will that makes you give, not get; a give and get that tell us what you are: how much a god, how much a human. I call on you to live the will to love.”

“‘How much a god, how much a human,’” Ramona repeated. “Now that’s something I’d like to ask Them, if I ever got to meet one.”

A few hours after sunrise, Marco arrived on his bike with a compartmentalized crate strapped on the back. Ramona and Ylenia handed off that week’s delivery: nine tiny arrangements in glasses and plastic vases and even a two-liter bottle they had scraped clean of adhesive. Most arrangements had two flowers or one—none of them had more than three. They had filled in the gaps with festive trash they had gathered from the dump on Thursday: plastic novelty straws, pieces of a broken bicycle wheel, old dowels and scraps of wood from unrecognizable household items. Most of the trash had been picked over in the years since They arrived. Anything that could be used, sold, burned or used to beat off a scavenging animal had been reclaimed by the very humans that had filled the dump in the first place.

Marco loaded the arrangements onto the back of his bike without saying anything. But Ylenia could have sworn she saw an eyebrow go up when he looked at their tray of offerings that week.

“I’ll be back tomorrow with the next orders, Your Highnesses.” He saluted them casually with two fingers to his brow and pedaled down the driveway, pulling out onto the road without looking for cars. They headed through the back door, scattering a flock of starlings that had been perched in a tree near the door. The birds soared above the trees and found each other, moving as one swirl. A gash of pulsing black in the bright morning sky. Ramona tugged the curtains shut and swore in Romanian.



Ylenia could feel herself waking enough to prick the surface of consciousness when she heard a gentle rapping on the back door. Ramona was already pulling herself into her jacket and grabbing the hatchet from its place beside her bed. She waved Ylenia away from the door and into the kitchen, out of the eyeline of the back window.

“Who’s there?” Ramona barked in a voice that would have conveyed fierceness if not for the shake on the last R. She held the hatchet down low, sharpened side out, ready for an up-swing.

“It’s Lola. I’m new. Marco said you’d be expecting me—”

“Your time isn’t until tomorrow.”

A gurgling coo and a squeak. Hadn’t Marco mentioned a baby? “I don’t need electricity. I just want to talk.” A long pause. “Marco said you were looking for things for your arrangements.”

“If you have something we can use, give it to Marco. You pay him, you can use the shed. That’s how this works.”

“I don’t have anything to trade, but I can tell you where to look.”

Ylenia nodded at Ramona and tugged her arm. “Let her in,” she mouthed. Ramona shook her head.

“We don’t talk to people from town,” Ramona said, resuming her too-harsh voice. “Too many people trying to steal electricity.”

“You can come out, and we can talk. I don’t have to come inside.”

“Whatever you have to say, say it there.”

Ylenia reached for the door handle but Ramona grabbed her wrist. “Absolutely not,” she hissed.

“She sounds like she’s nineteen, and she has a baby,” Ylenia said. “You’re being ridiculous.” She wrenched her wrist free and unlocked the main door. Through the storm door she could see Lola: puffy black coat with rips in the sleeves, bright pink earmuffs over greasy black hair that used to have red highlights; black tights with holes at some of the seams, rubber boots. Her face was angular, her cheekbones pronounced, like most people’s, but she looked like she had been thin even before They arrived. Her baby was barely visible through mounds of old blankets cradling him to her chest. Ylenia stepped onto the porch and Lola backed up to give her space.

“I’m Ylenia, and that’s Ramona. What’s your baby’s name?”

“Jackson, after his father,” Lola said, peering down at the bundle.

“You came on horseback, Marco said.” Ramona was still behind the storm door, speaking through the glass.

“I did.”

“Where’s the horse?”

“Back in town.”

“How do you feed a horse and a baby in the middle of March?”

“How do you grow orchids in the middle of March? We find ways.” Lola smiled sadly. Ylenia instantly liked her.

“What brings you to town?” Ramona asked. “Not a lot of tourism anymore.”

“Escaping the city. I had to be close to a hospital to give birth, but after that…” She shrugged. “My brother is a couple miles from the center of town, holed up with an old friend. He got word to me and said this was the best place to keep Jackson safe.”

“They have a compound six miles down the road,” Ylenia said. “We don’t see Them, but it’s close.”

“Close enough to do business, I hear.” Lola smiled again. “Flower arrangements. I had a good laugh when I heard that one. No offense.”

“We don’t get it, either. But they give us electricity in exchange. Unlimited, for the most part.”

Ramona fake-coughed. “Not unlimited. It comes and goes. And we have almost none to spare. If we use too much, it shuts off, and if it shuts off, we can’t keep the greenhouse going, and then it really shuts off.”

“Marco told me all about it. It’s an interesting deal,” Lola said. “Since I’ve got reliable transportation, I might be able to help you find things for your arrangements. I can travel between towns, too.”

“In exchange for what?” Ramona asked.

“I need electricity. Every day.”

“What for?” Ylenia asked. Breaking the rule.

“You’ll laugh.”

“Try me.”

“I have a breast pump. A pretty nice one.” Lola kicked at the dirt. “It’s hard otherwise. Feeding him.”

“That’s not just a phone or a radio though,” Ramona said. “That’s a lot of electricity several times a day, every day until he’s…” The rest of the sentence dangled, and Ylenia flexed her hands and studied them to keep from making eye contact.

“I could bring you stuff for your arrangements every day,” Lola said. “Other stuff, too. There’s a decent co-op twelve miles north and a few farms still operating to the east.”

Ylenia thought quickly. Three years without cars and GPS and modern conveniences and she still had to re-orient herself to the cardinal directions by imagining sunsets. “We have a supplier already,” she said.

The creases around Lola’s eyes hardened. “You know what They do with your arrangements, right?”

Screeching birds filled the silence. In the boredom and darkness and chaos and worry and cold, the question of what actually happened to their flowers after a delivery had never fully sank in, much less a possible answer.

“They throw them away,” Lola said. “Outside the compound, in these weird pods that they’ve sunk into the ground. They’re full of all kinds of stuff that they take from us and then just throw away.”

“How do you even know this?” Ramona barked. “Do you work for Them?”

“Do I look like I work for Them?” Lola lifted the edge of her jacket and revealed a handgun tucked into her waistband. There was almost no chance it was real, and if it was real, there was almost no chance it was loaded, and if it was loaded, there was almost no chance that it worked. But there it was, a rarity since disarmament two years ago. Even good knives were hard to find. “I’ve ridden past the compound three times now. They don’t leave, except to send a scout out a few times a day. And to dump all kinds of useful stuff, stuff we could be using, into their little backyard pods.”

“You went to the compound? On purpose?” Ylenia asked. “Why on earth would you do that?”

“Where do you think I got a nice breast pump?” Lola asked. “They have all kinds of stuff outside, just waiting to be taken back. Our stuff. They clearly don’t want anything to do with it.”

Ramona opened the storm door a crack, debating, and then swung it open all the way and joined her sister on the porch. Ylenia looked down on Lola and her baby but didn’t see them. She was imagining pulling up every last flower in the greenhouse and reseeding the soil with vegetables: tomatoes and sweet peppers and jalapenos and squash and green beans and marigolds. The things her father had grown in their little patch of a backyard when she was a kid.

“So,” Lola said. “Do we have a deal?”



The next night, Ylenia bundled up, feigning a chill. Two pairs of tights, an extra T-shirt, her thickest socks that weren’t full of holes. When Ramona fell asleep, she took the good LED flashlight from the bin by the front door, popped in two AA batteries, and slipped onto the porch. The moon was a fingernail high in the sky. It didn’t matter; nobody would see her anyway. There was a road right to Their compound—a former military base—but nothing would be on it. No cars, no bicycles, and, at this time of the year, no travelers on horseback or merchants pulling carts. It was a six-mile walk to the compound from town, five from their place at the farthest edge of the town, tucked away from everyone else.

Seeing the trash wouldn’t get them food. Seeing the trash wouldn’t answer any of Ylenia’s burning questions, like How long will They be here? and What happens when we can’t even find three-year-old Oreos anymore? Seeing the trash heap wouldn’t make the vegetables sprout or clear the backyard of starlings.

The compound was mostly unlit but hard to miss in the distance. She could see fencing and a few lights and the guard towers and a complete lack of human touches. No signs with crisp lettering naming the base, no soldiers in Jeeps or jogging on foot, no spotlights sweeping the ground to look for interlopers. Just one metal tower with a pulsing red light on top and small purple and green lights on every other fence post, twinkling intermittently. She wondered what the lights meant; if the lights meant. She wondered what They had done with the weapons inside, with the things that only made sense to humans: the kitchen equipment, the uniforms, the records and filing cabinets and desk chairs and American flags.

She turned the flashlight off as she approached, pausing to take long, slow breaths that she hoped weren’t making much noise. So what? Even if they saw her, would They come out and apprehend her? They didn’t hunt humans for sport. It wouldn’t have been a sport. Humans had been nothing more than a curious virus, easily neutered. With the electricity went the smartphones and the Internet and the radio and lights. And with the darkness had come normal Circadian rhythms and quiet nights and cold animal fear. There were only two meaningful divisions left: Them, and everything that was here before.

Ylenia was close enough to see what Lola had been referring to: on one side of the compound, visible from the road, she could see the outlines of something that defied any military shape. She swung a wide circle to approach the garbage pods from the side farthest away from the compound. The smell hit her before she could pick out clear shapes with her flashlight: nothing was rotting, nothing was putrefying. There were clearly no maggots, no rats, no cockroaches, nothing decomposing. The smell was of plastic burning, but not being burnt by fire; and underneath that scent something metallic and chemical. Something repellant.

In an instant Ylenia was frozen to the ground, unable to move her legs to run or her arm to lower her flashlight or even her finger to turn it off. Maybe it was alien technology. Maybe it was millions of ancestors who had figured—sometimes correctly—that prey is more tempting when it moves. One of Them walked into her beam and stopped ten feet from her.

She couldn’t have prepared for its ordinariness: human shape, a little larger than a human. Two legs, two arms, a head, a space where eyes probably were; and an organic suit of some kind and a thin, flexible helmet that covered the places where eyes and a mouth might be.

“Hello.” The helmet moved with its face. Perhaps the helmet was its face.

“H-hello.” Ylenia struggled to swallow and her chest ached with the effort of keeping blood moving.

“What’s your name?”

Ylenia thought of advanced AI, the kind that was just starting to appear in smartphone apps and in-home devices when They arrived. The kind that collapsed comfortably into code when poked. But this was definitely looking back.

“Ylenia.”

“Ee-lane-ee-ah.” It had managed to strip all emphasis from her name, treating each syllable as an equal. “You have the flowers.”

“You know me? I mean, yes, I have the flowers. I mean, we grow the flowers. My sister and me. Well, half-sister. I don’t have them with me right now. You have them, actually. We sent some yesterday.”

It looked her up and down slowly. “You are not permitted here.”

“I know.”

“You must leave.”

“I will.”

Neither moved.

“I just wanted to see our flowers,” Ylenia said. “You throw them away, outside.”

“Yes.”

“What we give you, those are called flower arrangements,” she said in a way that she hoped was not patronizing. “Humans used to make them for each other as gifts. Sometimes apologies.”

“None of our protocols are preventing that from continuing.”

“You’re preventing that from continuing! We can’t do anything without electricity.”

“You have electricity.”

Ylenia was starting to drop back into the rhythm of conversation. She realized that was what it was: a conversation.

“How are you speaking English?”

“The same way you are.”

“But how did you learn it?”

“Similar to the way you did.”

“How old are you?”

“Our years are not the same length as yours.”

“But are you far along into your lifespan? Like, halfway? Will you die soon?”

The pause was perhaps only a slight hesitation, but she had caught it off guard. Was it the universally unacceptable idea of death? The fact that it was an entirely personal question, one that couldn’t be answered with the collective “we?”

“I am not closer to death than you are.”

Ylenia suddenly did not want to be standing in front of it, in front of the piles of trash that should have smelled but didn’t, in an absurdly dark night that should have been lit with streetlights and headlights and porch lights. She realized what the sensation was: the revoking of some kind of special permission she had been granted to stand here and question this being. It was impatient.

“Will you tell the others that I was here?”

“I will not tell them.”

Ylenia felt the next question but couldn’t ask it: Do you need to tell them for them to know I was here? Instead: “Will you turn off our electricity?”

“There is no reason to turn off your electricity.”

“You turned off everybody else’s.”

“There was a reason.”

Ylenia was surprised to feel her eyes well up. “There was a reason? What was the reason for knocking out entire cities? What was the reason for keeping hospitals without power? What was the reason for…”

Where its eyes might have been behind the helmet, a series of green and purple lights pulsed faintly. Ylenia thought: starlings.

“Will anything be different because I came here?”

It paused again but actually moved its body this time, a slight shifting back and forth that Ylenia read as both impatience and mild amusement. “Not in any way that is meaningful to you.”

“Can I ask you one last question?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you here?”

“It is my job to talk to humans.”

“I mean, why are all of you, all two million of you or whatever, here on my planet.”

The answer was expected, and unsatisfying: “There is a reason.”

“Do we have something you want?”

It didn’t pause. “No.”

“Can I ask a different question then? As my last question?” This time, it did not say yes or no; it just waited. “We used to give groups of animals a name. Like, a ‘murder of crows.’ I don’t know why, we just did. I can’t look it up anymore, so I have to know: what is a group of starlings called?”



Marco was waiting for her at the back door the next morning. Ylenia had arrived back at the house a few hours before sunrise. She sat on the back porch, flicking the flashlight on and off, letting the light bounce off the greenhouse, the shed, their tools, their buckets, the compost bin.

“You’re here early,” she said.

“You’re up early.”

Ylenia shrugged. Nobody—no human—had seen her come or go. Maybe They told Marco. What did it matter? Nothing had happened. She couldn’t stop thinking that: Nothing happened. I went there, and nothing happened. I saw one of Them, and nothing happened. I talked to one of Them, and nothing happened. Nothing is going to happen.

“I have something for you.”

“How many do they want this week?”

“Not an order.” Marco pulled a black pouch from his breast pocket. It was black but iridescent, shiny purple and green and dark blue when the light hit it just right. She took it from him and rolled it between her fingers: smooth to the touch and she couldn’t tell if it was synthetic or organic material.

“What is it?”

“I didn’t ask.” Marco saluted her and pedaled away. When he was beyond her sight, she opened it at the top where there was a slit. It softened in her hand and opened easily. Inside, a folded piece of paper and a hard, almond-shaped object the size of her thumb. It was brown-black with tiny holes that made her think of the pit of a peach. A seed. She opened the note. It had been typed or printed in ink, clearly by some kind of human-made device: A piece of my home.

Ylenia slipped the note and the seed into her pocket and went inside. Ramona was stirring a pot of oats on the stove. “Rain today,” she said, not looking up. “First since fall. Finally warming up.”

The seed bulged in her pocket, pressing against her hip. She thought of the day Ramona had arrived, banging on the front door, drenched from a downpour she had had to walk through. A bike with a flat tire discarded next to her, the front wheel still spinning. It was hard to tell, but she was crying.

“My mom is d-dead,” she had wailed to Ylenia, the half-sister she had seen every-other Christmas and Thanksgiving. The half-sister she didn’t know and couldn’t talk to because she had never been around. “Is Dad still here?”

They ate the cooked oatmeal without sugar or milk, quickly spooning it down before it cooled and hardened. Ylenia would never tell her sister about sneaking to the compound, about meeting one of Them, about the seed. Not because Ramona wouldn’t be interested in hearing it, or because she would be angry that Ylenia had done it, but because it wouldn’t matter. Until the lights went out or one of them got sick or the food ran out, it wouldn’t matter.

Ramona tossed their bowls into the sink, ran the water to fill them, and looked around the kitchen. “Ready?”

Ylenia followed her out the back door. The rain had stopped, replaced by a humid mist. The clouds dragged themselves in the direction the sun would be setting that night. Ramona tromped down the back steps and paused at the bottom. “Ura! No starlings!”

A sick feeling twisted inside Ylenia’s stomach. Every bird of every species was gone. She smelled, faintly, but not faintly enough to be in her imagination, the plastic-chemical smell from the compound. She imagined it on her skin, sticking to the inside of her lungs, and coughed violently. She had the sense that something had been given and something else taken, something requested, something confessed. Something irreversible.

Ramona was already through the plastic door of the greenhouse, not bothering to hold it open. From within the sheer walls of the structure, Ylenia could hear her sister whistling, whistling, filling the places where birds had screeched and rustled their wings in sync just one day before.

Emily Weber

Emily Weber’s work has been published in Bartleby Snopes, The Adroit Journal, Glassworks, Jersey Devil Press, Soundings East and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she currently lives near Philadelphia.