Thrust: A Novel

For a moment, nothing moved except Laisvė’s breathing. Her eyes fixed on the object. It was a locket on a chain, gold, dirty, old, or just scratched and faded with time. She couldn’t not reach for the object. She couldn’t not yank it free. She couldn’t not open it.

Inside, under glass, was a lock of baby-fine hair.

She was studying the object and the hair until she saw a flash of color and movement in the corner of her eye, low to the ground, something about the size of a hand, coming closer to her. A turtle — a northern box turtle. The turtle ambled up to the dead woman’s hand and stopped.

“Please, girl, can you help me back to the Narrows?”

Laisvė looked at the turtle. The turtle strained its neck up toward her.

“It’s not a rhetorical question,” the turtle groused. “What’s that thing?” The turtle turned its little head toward the mound of dead woman. Was that a furrowed brow? she wondered. Did box turtles have brows?

“A woman fell here. Next to me,” Laisvė said. “That’s her. She’s dead. She almost landed on me.”

The animal raised its voice. “Well, that’s nothing to do with me, is it? Is it anything to do with you?”

Laisvė puzzled on the question. She did feel a tug at her attention, if nothing else. The color of the print on the woman’s dress was impossible to ignore. Along with the pattern of the turtle’s shell, god, you know, the flowered fabric was mesmerizing.

“Look,” the turtle said. “I’m in need of aid. I have an injured leg. Might you return me to the Narrows Botanical Garden’s turtle sanctuary?”

Laisvė was still staring at the dead woman’s dress when she answered. “That sanctuary has been gone for years and years. It lives in another time. I read about it.”

“Right, I know. However, there is still an overgrown plot there where we are relatively safe from predators. Nothing that existed before isn’t something else now. And, anyway, it’s not the sanctuary but the old Narrows I’m trying to reach. If you are able to help me, that is. I’ve a relative in greater need than I am. I could just use a lift. Besides… there’s trouble about.”

Laisvė’s gaze drifted to the mud and yellow shapes on the dome of the turtle’s back. She could not help but admire the creature’s shell, the bright orange-yellow eyes, even the skin — the slime-green bumpy jaw and upper neck giving way to the smoother folds of the lower neck, the yellow-spotted legs, even the toenails. Well, phalanges, actually, but to her they resembled beautiful elongated toenails. She wondered at the perfect body, the plastron connected to the carapace. Briefly, she imagined herself shelled and immediately felt less exposed and anxious. Why had she been born a human girl?

Her choice was not difficult. With one hand, she snatched the locket’s chain from the dead woman’s grasp; with the other, she picked up the turtle. “I can take you to the old Narrows.” She began a brisk walk across the street toward the waterway, bypassing the Awn Shop, which made her heart beat fast enough that she could feel it in her neck. “But you have to show me which current path to take.”

“Current path?” The turtle’s little head swayed back and forth as she carried him. “What are you talking about?” Now the girl was running.

Soon they were at the lip between land and the old Narrows.

The turtle was grateful, if a bit suspicious. This girl seemed strange. He wished she would put him down. Or even just throw him into the Narrows. He could smell where he wanted to be. He was craving earthworms, wishing he’d sucked one down back at the dirt patch.

The girl stopped running at the edge of a dock, or what remained of one. He could see the surface of the Narrows.

Laisvė held the turtle up to her face, so that they were eye to eye. “I know about you box turtles,” she said. “You appeared abruptly in the fossil record, essentially in modern form.” She turned the turtle over to glimpse its belly and then back again. “In just a moment,” she said, “when we reach the water, I want very specific directions. A deal’s a deal. There’s a penny I need to carry.”

What was this girl thinking of? “What do you mean, carry?”

“You know, like carrier pigeons. Derived from rock doves. The ones with magnetoreceptive abilities.” She scratched her head. When had she become a carrier anyway? Maybe the moment they shot her mother and she watched her sink into the sea, her outstretched hand sinking into the water Laisvė’s very last glimpse of her mother. Or possibly the day her brother dissolved into a crowd on the ferry, nothing left but the words of him in her, a forever floating boy. The holes in a girl have to fill with something. Her fingers twitched. “What’s your name?” she asked.

He sighed. “Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Chordata. Class: Reptilia—”

But she continued for him: “Order: Testudines, suborder: Cryptodira, family: Emydidae, genus: Terrapene. Not what I asked, though. What is your name?”