Chapter 12
Tomorrow Night Too
Maisie
Oz and I work through the day. Fourteen more batches of rosemary-oat. I weigh and label and pack while he stirs.
We eat Mrs. Pritchett’s casserole standing at the studio counter between batches seven and eight, me with a fork and him with one tendril submerged in a bowl of it, slowly dissolving the contents for nutrients.
Then it’s back to work.
By nine o’clock, the studio is full of curing racks and the count on my whiteboard tells me I’m more than halfway done with fulfilling the Verdance order. My hands smell like rosemary and lye and the faint mineral coolness that Oz leaves on everything he touches.
I scrub up at the utility sink, dry my arms on a clean towel, and look out the window.
Full dark.
The ridge is a black cutout against a sky prickling with stars. No lights moving on the road.
Gary’s house, barely visible around the curve, is dark except for the blue flicker of a television. Mrs. Pritchett’s place shows one warm square of kitchen light, which means she’s in for the night with Harold and his reflux.
“Okay,” I say to Oz. “Come on.”
I lead him to the back door, the one that opens onto the scrubby half-acre behind the house where I keep meaning to put a garden and never do. The screen door squeaks when I push it open, and I hold it with my hip while Oz flows through behind me.
He stops on the concrete step, and I watch him from three feet away, arms crossed over my chest.
The air is cool and dry and carries the sharp green smell of creosote, which only smells like that after dark when the resins release, and underneath it, the dusty mineral note of cooling rock.
Oz’s entire surface goes still.
Every color drains to a pale, luminous silver, like someone wiped a screen clean.
Then, slowly, pigment bleeds back in. Teal from the ground up. Violet rolling across his shoulders. Gold sparking in scattered constellations across his chest and arms, appearing and vanishing like fireflies trapped under glass.
He lifts his face toward the sky.
He has no eyes in the way that I have eyes, no pupils to dilate, but the flat plane of his face reshapes itself into something concave, cupped toward the stars like a satellite dish, and I understand that he is looking with his whole body.
“Oh,” he says.
The word vibrates through his form. I feel it in my sternum from three feet away.
He steps off the concrete and onto the bare ground, and something happens to his feet. They spread. Flatten and widen, thinning until I can see the dirt through him, and then sink, his edges seeping into the soil like water finding the path of least resistance.
His whole body shivers, a single full-length tremor that moves from the earth contact upward.
“There’s limestone,” he whispers. “Twelve feet down. A shelf. And above it, calcium deposits in the—”
He pauses, searching for words.
“Layers. I can feel the layers beneath me.”
A breeze comes down off the ridge, carrying sage and the faint dry musk of something animal, jackrabbit maybe, or coyote. It hits Oz’s surface and his whole form ripples, every inch of him registering the moving air.
Colors chase across him in chaotic, overlapping waves: amber, rose, deep green, a blue so dark it’s almost black, colors I’ve never seen him produce.
He extends a tendril toward the nearest creosote bush and lets the tip brush a cluster of tiny waxy leaves.
“This plant is stressed,” he says quietly. “It hasn’t had deep water in a long time. The roots are reaching laterally, not down. It’s doing something remarkable with very little.”
I sit down on the concrete step and watch him move through my backyard like a visitor to a cathedral.
He touches everything.
The wooden fence post, warped and silvered with age. The coil of garden hose I left out two summers ago. A patch of grass growing in the crack where the concrete meets the dirt.
Each contact produces a new ripple of color, a new pause, a new soft observation.
He finds a scorpion under a flat rock and crouches over it, his glow dimming to near-nothing so he won’t disturb it.
“She’s carrying,” he murmurs. “I can feel the weight distribution. Seventeen. Maybe eighteen.”
“You can count baby scorpions?”
“Their combined mass creates a very slight density differential through the ground.”
The scorpion, unbothered by the enormous glowing entity hovering three inches above her, trundles off into the darkness.
Oz watches her go with the same focused attention he gave the pizza, the river stones, my body.
He straightens and tilts his face to the sky again.
The gold constellations on his surface have synchronized, pulsing in a slow rhythm that mirrors something, and it takes me a minute to realize he’s matching the visible flicker of the stars, the atmospheric scintillation that makes them seem to breathe.
“I can feel them,” he says. “The radiant energy. I could always feel it through the fissure, but I thought—”
His voice catches, a wet, resonant sound, like a finger dragged along the rim of a glass.
“I thought that was all there was. The warmth from one direction. I made a map. Decades of information, the seasonal shifts, I cataloged every variation.”
He is quiet for a long beat.
“There are so many of them.”
I press my palms flat against the concrete and breathe.
Decades.
He lay in a cave for decades feeling starlight through a crack and thought that thin band of radiant heat was the whole sky.
He mapped it.
He cataloged seasonal shifts in the warmth pattern and built a model of the universe from fourteen inches of information, and the model was so small, and the real thing is so big, and he is standing in my backyard finding it for the first time in his life.
The sky is enormous above us, and the stars are doing what they always do, and the monster in my backyard is tasting the desert and falling in love with every molecule of it.
We stay out for forty minutes.
He samples the wind from six different orientations.
He maps the subsurface moisture gradient across my entire property by standing in four spots and going still.
He finds a colony of harvester ants and lies flat against the ground to feel their collective vibration.
At one point he just stands in the open, arms spread, face tipped back, every inch of his surface cycling through every color he has, drinking the sky.
I sit on my step and watch and let the quiet fill in around us.
When I finally say “We should go in,” he turns toward me, and the colors slow to something deep and settled.
He flows back across the yard and stops at the bottom of the step, his face level with mine.
“Maisie,” he says.
Just my name.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for bringing me outside.”
I reach out and press my palm flat against his chest. The surface gives under my hand, warm and yielding, and I feel his pulse move through my fingers and up into my wrist.
The gold brightens where I touch him, spreading outward like ripples.
“Tomorrow night too,” I say. “If you want.”
He covers my hand with his.
Then I hear a faint ringing.
At first I’m not sure what it is, until I remember the landline.
The actual corded phone mounted on the kitchen wall that I keep because cell service drops out twice a week and because Gram refuses to call a number she can’t find in a phone book.
“Hold on,” I say, and push myself up off the step.
The screen door squeaks behind me, and I catch it before it slams and cross the kitchen in four steps.
I answer, knowing exactly who it is. “Hey, Gram.”
“Maisie Louise, I hope your affairs are in order, because I’m returning early.”
“Y-you are? It’s not even October yet, Gram.”
“And here I thought you’d be excited to have some extra quality time with your grandmother.”
There’s a teasing tone in her voice, but also a hint of suspicion. Not good. “Of course!” I say a little too quickly. “It’s just… My place is a total mess right now.”
“Oh, you know I never mind that. Anyway, I’ll be back in town and settled in by the weekend, then I’ll come by and visit. Should only be a few days.”
“A… A few days. Great, I can’t wait.”
There’s an amused huff of air on the other line. “All right, I know you’re busy. Love you, Maze.”
“Love you too, Gram.”
She hangs up.
I set the phone down in its cradle with a plastic click.
Through the kitchen window, I see Oz on the back step.
He’s watching me. His face, the smooth concave plane of it, is turned toward the glass, and the glow along his edges has gone still, muted to a quiet indigo.
He can read my body through walls.
He felt Mrs. Pritchett’s attention pattern through the siding this morning.
He knows what my shoulder muscles do before I reach for something.
He knows something just changed.
The gold in his surface flashes once, a question, and goes dim.
Three days.
Maybe four.
I have never kept a secret from Gram.
Not the credit card debt, not Kyle.
She knows all of it.
She’s the person I tell everything to.
So what do I tell her about the monster who’s slowly teaching himself the shape of my life?
I stand in the kitchen with the phone in its cradle and my hand at my side and look at Oz through the window, and I have no idea what I’m going to do.