Maysie's Galaxy ONC 2023

The View

The kitten was so little that they couldn't easily tell whether it was a boy or girl, so Maysie decided on leaving the name simple and changing to whatever the cat became as it aged.

And it grew.

Mr. Kitty soon kept the land near their camp cleared, and the ferals started clearing up the ruins at the crown of the bird. As the best-fed cat (having two doting humans feeding him their scraps on top of all the rats and bunnies he ate), the cat became a massive Tom who fathered more than his fair share of the ferals, leading to bigger and meaner cats for the rats to face. Slowly the new filth began to dissipate in the old broken Victorian and Sears homes. Maysie and Alder got fewer sniffles and somewhat began pitying the rodents.

It got no colder despite their slowly increasing distance from the sun, and they were warm enough in their rabbit furs, so life went on the same as it ever was while the bird ate its fill of the asteroids.

There was a faster sense of night and day as the bird darted this way and that, rotating in the sunlight. The sun was much smaller and didn't seem to warm anything unless the bird faced its head into the light for more than a full day. Only then did the furs they both wore become too stuffy to wear.

On her 9th birthday, Alder took her to the beak's edge, near the tiny feathers of the nose. They touched the edge of the hard beak and found it too slippery to walk out on, so they sat and enjoyed their lunch as a picnic while the beak slowly swooped towards each asteroid and swallowed it whole. This explained the mild tremors that they felt, daily. It was remarkably stable on the head, for how much the bird moved.

Until it wasn't. The bird whipped around so fast that the stars streaked. Maysie and Alder started to slightly lift up until they grabbed hold of bunches of baby feathers around them.

The head dived down and skirted the neck in a grand display that showed the bird was nothing like Earth's surface creatures.

Maysie could see the back rapidly approaching. There was a shell—landmass—across its back. It looked familiar, but she couldn't place it. "What's with that shape?"

"You ask while we're trying not to fall off, May?" Alder was gritting his teeth in terror. "You have no fear of this life, do you?"

"Should I fear when it's easy to hold on?" The idea of being scared when they were safe confused the child.

"Do you remember how many times this beak tossed us up in the air on the day the shell broke up?"

"...once?"

They had never had a conversation like this before, but then she couldn't remember Alder this scared, either. Every desperate measure they lived by was a slow trickling worry that you starved off with work. This? There wasn't anything to do but wait. Maysie wouldn't understand this behavior until she was much older, but it was baffling at 9.

"Maysie, I lost count after a dozen blows to the shell until it finally dislodged our hills from the rest of the egg and landed on this damn bird's head. Then while we stayed mostly still, it kept slamming into the crust that surrounded our home, until the whole shell fell apart. Billions of people died that day. It is natural to fear something like that."

Maysie didn't push for a further answer, worrying about disappointing Alder.

Before the land mass, the bird roughly parted plumes, targeting a speck that soon took the shape of a man holding a weapon pointed at the ground—the bird's skin. In his other hand, he held a bottle that Alder always told her to never touch.

Faintly, the man's voice could be heard. " Come and 'effin get me ya' dumb mutant!"

The shots rang out much louder. 1, 2, 3... 1,2, 3... 1, 2, Crunch!

The bird bit him like he was a flea on Mr. Kitty. Maysie nearly let go out of shock at seeing that their home did not care for them.

That was when she at least understood Alder's fear—not the behaviors. Their host was safe as long as it was indifferent to them. It was not their friend, and in a sense, it would never be home. They were on the back of a living thing and had little value to it.

But what scared Maysie more, as the bird went back to slowly eating its rocks out in space, was that there were humans out there that went out of their way to provoke the beast.

It was her first truly adult thought.

Once they were sure that their way home would be calm, Alder lead the child back to their little stretch of land. The first thing he did there was find two small glasses and one of those forbidden bottles and poured them both into a doll's cup.

"You told me not to touch this."

"I did that because this is medicine, not just food. We are taking a nap and not talking about that until we've slept. Down it."

As same as ever, she obeyed Alder and drank her medicine. In short order, she drowsed against his shoulder as he refilled his glass several times more.

When she came to, she was in the hammock he had built to keep her away from the worst of the rats while he still slept on the floor pallet. Alder's snoring was heavy and his face flushed, so she went and traveled out to the last half-collapsed houses to get on the roof of the one that towered above the feathers.

The air was thin up here, only four stories above the bird's head (including the soil)--breathing hurt. But it gave a clear vision of the back of the bird.

It was immense. And their host wasn't only a bird. That's part of what had shocked her out of the many upsets she had during their trip. It had a tortoise shell, four sets of wings, and flippered humanesuqe hands, and across that shell lay portions of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa, all well-defined by the Mediterranean Sea.

Perhaps the greatest part of humanity survived. They weren't alone.

It should have been a welcoming feeling, but how could anyone cling to a man who went crazy and picked fights like the man who died?

She had always been pushed beyond her age, but this? What could she do with these thoughts?

"Maysie-may, I know you're up there!" Enough time had passed that Alder came looking for her. He suspected that she would want to see everything again. "Come down so we can talk."

"No!" Her defiant streak had gained wings, fueled by a rage that just knew he had known about this before her. Not that she could figure out how he knew, but he had to lead her in all things and rarely told her an "I don't know." He knew too much of everything for this to be new to him.

"Maysie, I can't explain things without talking and I don't handle the lack of oxygen very well. You can either come down now, or come find me back at camp, and I promise we will talk."

The child thought about it, then made her way back down before he even wandered off.