Narrator 2 (21:20)
The Agent and the Ghost Rider struck their deal with me fast. They want a good heart take with sequestering officials careful not to call it quarantine. Oh so careful. It's still localized and contained. We've been through this before. Let's avoid public unrest. I'VE got time. We all do. At home, cooped up, our unaffected companion, animals and urban livestock locked in beside us or humanely euthanized or not so humanely taken out. With a shotgun blast, gunshots echo across my neighborhood day and night or still out there right now, creatures set loose from understandable human fear or a mistaken sense of pity. The pets we knew skulk in alleyways, skitter across rooftops, flap against windows, or hurl bloody bodies against our doors like so many persistent, deranged furry battering rams saying mommy, let me in, saying papa, I'm a good boy. Let me in. All quiet here at Chaise Francie. Though my parakeet Petey wasn't exposed, he's nestled down for the night in his covered cage in my basement apartment here in downtown Bakersfield. I'm Francie, the so called St. Francie of East Ridgeway Plaza, who was right there when everything spun out of control, the only person immune to the terrors that began at our local mall 10 days back, the animals outside rampaging within the metroplex. Okay, so these backyard chickens and former pets of yours aren't exactly friendly to me. Instead they're, I'd guess you'd say attuned, sympathetic to my wishes and desires. So I'm safe. And though it's forbidden, I can go outside. And some nights, when the ghetto birds aren't making a racket overhead, training their lights on yards and streets, I do sneak out. I wander freely in the smoky summer night, encountering animals crouch and run fingers across your snarling tabby's back as it squeezes under your fence, the briefest electricity exchanged between us like a coded note between spies. At age 28, you wouldn't think becoming ad hoc manager at the Claws and Paws Pet center was a coup, but in a slipping down life, it's an upgrade. Finally, I could chip away at debt, maybe even pull ahead the shop owners. More an idea than a reality. I got the sense they spent their time basking under a foreign sun, palm shadows falling on their indolent, well, tanned limbs. At least that's how our manager, Billy Baskins, painted them. In their absence. He basically did whatever. Having recently inherited money, he did it with swagger. What Billy B. Wanted was both the steady mall store paycheck but also his freedom. He fed me an extra cut under the table to take his hours and assume his role. And if some of his offshore and crypto investments took, the promise was I'd become manager. Thing about working like a dog for weeks on end is you Start to see things. Corner of your eye, trick of the light Stuff a shadow that detaches itself from a wall and moves funny. Minor hallucinatory business, Lack of sleep, running on hostess snack cakes and fumes, trying to wrangle scents out of years of coffee stained inventory sheets. Billy B. Has royally effed reality becomes wiggly as a gummy worm. That's why the strange bird didn't surprise me. Not at first. Now the leading theory you hear from the media is we caused this. Claws and paws, I mean. Imported something funky shipped in from one of those balmy tropical aisles patronized by our absentee owners. Xenophobic racist bullshit, that's what that is. No friends. This plague or scourge or contagious whatever. It came from a wild bird. I saw it happen. 10pm Plaza closed. Alone in the fun zone play pit, perched on a questionably shaped purple fiberglass mushroom. I nod a stale ish grape. PB and J. Nobody nearby but a couple security goons shooting the shit on walkie talkies and that one stoned guy going round and round on the floor polisher. So this quick flitting thing slips through the busted window in the atrium, comes down from the night sky, goes zip zap zip through the rafters, moving all erratic like a bat but faster than any bat I'd ever seen, leaving a smudgy contrail like somebody ran their finger across a wet canvas. I blinked. This was no regular sparrow. There it was on the Cheshire Cat slide, its strawberry pink tongue carved with cuss words. Blank page, white, that bird eyes glinting like pinheads, long ink black wings and tail like a wren mashed with a bird of paradise. I felt awe, stricken, intrigued, confused, but also super bad, probably endangered, like our hopeless burrowing ground owls and our hapless kit foxes. How would this wild thing find its way back out of this spooky cavernous space here on the east end, built near the canyon where the Kern river exits the foothills, its whitewater diverted into concrete canals. This place, this second less popular mall, constructed on what had been relatively untouched scrubland full of California poppies and songbirds, had always felt cursed, the leaning edge of expanding city sprawl, a failing proposition from day one. Shopping centers were dying everywhere, so we were extra hurting. Sears and May Co. Belly up, smaller storefronts empty like gaps in a skull's grimace. A popular church housed next door to Claus and Paws kept the whole mall half afloat. Four big consecutive spaces, their clientele more tent revivalist than suburban Episcopalian. During services, their unholy clamor thumped and thrummed through the adjoining wall. Trembling hanging leashes and collars, strychnine and writhing serpents filled my head while the puppies froze in place, listening. Kittens and hamsters too, unearthly still fish hanging in the tanks like they'd been hit by a stun gun. Curtains covered the church storefront so you couldn't steal a peek at all. This humming and hoo ha. Stressful as hell to work adjacent to though made the mind go berserkers. So anyhow, tonight this zebra colored thing that had wandered in from the wilderness had all my attention as I chewed my miserable sack lunch and on its wings it seemed to lift me to the rafters and through them, zip zap zip, my hopes and dreams, trailing that damn bird like bows on a kite's tail, uplifted, inspired. I'd get money together, go back to school. This harebrained notion deepened, broadened. I'd become a writer, perhaps even the next Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson or whatever the girl version of them was. Now the bird rematerialized on a big bench airbrushed with lurid blossoms, cocked its head and regarded me just like the owl in Blade Runner, and I leaped to action, thinking, let me help you. I squeezed under the shop's roll top gate, fetched a sack of birdseed stuff intended for wildlife, squeezed back under, spread a pile on the rump of the Mad Hatter ride on the one that pinched kids on the regular with its springs. That bird flitted to the Hatter's ass, peck peck, pecked up some seed, gave me another cocked head look, then streaked up. Seconds later something hit me on my forearm, a glob of zebra colored bird shit searing like a chemical burn. Oh, thanks for nothing, asshole. Sniffling, I rubbed my arm clean on the astroturf, feeling funny, like I'd been cracked wide open, made aware of the immensity of the universe and my miniscule spot here in the self perceived middle, an ant tiny enough to crawl on a crumb, a crumb which was the entire world, a world out of balance and in trouble. The poop left a painful spot above my wrist like someone put out a stogie on me. It's healed now, a shiny pink circle. Next day I was freshening up the litter lining the glass fronted cases. These cockapoos lived up to their name, the Rascals. Puppies were our biggest draw, and kitties the display windows of puppies and kittens dancing around, nose printing and paw printing the glass tumbling in wrestling matches, curled up in warm, sleepy clutches. The thin stream of shoppers still regularly gathered, becoming an appreciative puddle, smiling, saying, oh my God, look at this one. Falling in love on the spot. Sometimes someone even purchased an animal, so I worked extra hard to keep their enclosures spotless, inviting instead of gross and depressing. My co worker Jael was on break, leaving me alone and vulnerable. So in flounced the three bees as they always did back in high school, bees meant blondes. Now, obviously, it's bitches Mickey, Nikki, and Ashley M. Now grown up, married off, each with some nebulous career, yoga teacher, influencer, and whatever it was poor third wheel Nicky did, her mousy roots always coming in too fast. My tormentors, my adult bullies. Their athleisure wear filled the shop with loud, unasked for color. I smelled the cocktails they'd guzzled at Chili's. Hey, France, hard at work or hardly working? Mickey, fake baked and smug under the fluorescence clocking my sweaty braids, rumpled apron and laden poop bag.
