Page 32 of Bent Heavens

She blew out a nervous breath and scooted forward until she could feel the skinner’s warm flesh through her jeans. She positioned the razor inches from its face.

“Closer,” Doug pressed. “Get that thing in its nose.”

Liv didn’t want to hear a third critique. She shoved the razor into the alien’s face. Her reward was a queasy thrill, watching the skinner whip its rubbery neck to evade contact. A pointless struggle: Liv pressed the razor’s handle over the thing’s mouth, while the blade rested against its nostrils. The skinner flopped and, sure enough, the blade nicked the small, delicate flap of its nose.

Liv recoiled on instinct, but tried to push aside the nausea. A little blood was nothing at all. It might focus the skinner, help it get a big whiff of her father’s smell.

“Talk to it,” Doug said. “Like we said.”

Liv nodded and cleared her throat. This was nothing like speech class, and yet she found herself strangled with nerves.

“Lee Fleming,” she said. “Where is Lee Fleming?”

Skinners had mastered interplanetary travel. Doug’s rationale was that they therefore must be highly intelligent and capable of recognizing sounds if not words, though he did leave room for an alternate theory that, to Liv, felt plucked from science fiction: that individual skinners were indeed dumb and that their collective intellect rested in overlord figures like the Whistler or the Green Man.

Doug’s baton connected with the skinner’s hip a second time, and the alien’s body jiggled as if electrocuted. Liv jerked, too, and couldn’t help but notice where blobby tumors on its hip had been squashed flat, where whitish skin there had gone hot pink. She tried to focus; she’d missed her cue. She swiped for one of the photos of Lee and held it so close to the skinner’s eyes that, when it contorted, the stiff photo paper dug red scratches across the eyeballs’ plump white surfaces.

Keep going, don’t stop, don’t think, she told herself. She pushed the safety razor harder against the thing’s mouth. The plastic handle clattered off crooked teeth.

“His name was Lee Fleming,” she said.

Doug let loose, harder this time. The skinner thrashed about. The flesh of its left hip was rising like bread.

“Lee Fleming,” Liv repeated. “Lee Fleming, Lee Fleming.”

The violence drove everything from Liv but the anxiety that these three syllables were losing meaning, degenerating from words that symbolized her beloved father into nonsense prattle that meant nothing but oncoming agony. Doug hit the skinner a few more times, and Liv watched the thing learn to bear down in anticipation, muscles thickening before each strike.

Chirp, she wanted to tell it, and the surprise notion screwed up her chant: Flee Lemming, Leaf Femming. If the skinner would only make one of its small, sympathetic sounds, it might give her and Doug the excuse they needed to pull back and reassess the possibly flawed plan under which they labored.

To her utter shock, the skinner did what she hoped.

“Car.”

Liv’s head snapped back so fast a neck muscle cramped. This wasn’t just an alien chirp. It was recognizable, an English word that might have been said by her mother, home early, needing the station wagon. Liv looked to the door and listened, but heard nothing from the direction of the house. She looked up at Doug, but he didn’t appear to have heard. He had the raw, busted end of the table leg pressed against the skinner’s hip and was grinding it in a circular pattern, shaving off a curlicue of skin.

“Bow.”

This time Liv hissed. She didn’t mean to. Doug quit twisting the table-leg baton and frowned in uncertainty. Liv’s mind spun into the rafters, among the dangling weapons. Bow—her dad had brought an Inuit bow to the climactic hunt through Black Glade. Could it be that the animal that had rushed through the underbrush that day hadn’t been a rabbit or squirrel, but rather this ghastly thing?

“Hole.”

Doug scrambled back, taking the baton with him. His motion startled Liv and she stood; their shoulders collided. Hole, Liv thought, could refer to so many things. Could the skinner be alluding to Abyss? Had the trap caught a second skinner? Or did this skinner wish to be tossed into Abyss so that it might impale itself upon the spikes and die?

“It’s talking,” Liv said.

Doug shook his head. “Just noises.”

“Those are words.”

“They just sound like words,” Doug insisted.

They were words, Liv was certain of it. Simple, single-syllable, preschool words, and for an instant Liv entertained a fantasy of Doug sneaking into the shed every night to read picture books to the skinner. What might the alien parrot next? Boy? Dog? Tree?

“Car,” the skinner repeated.

Liv pointed a finger and shook it.

“You can’t tell me that’s not a word!”